Breaking the habit
anonymous
June 25 2021, 22:18:31 UTC
We're suffering from a perfect storm of technological progress, consumerism and pervasive networking.
Once it became possible to produce computers whose purpose was not just "computing" for its own sake, it opened up the mass market for computing devices. Even before then, consumerism drove demand for ever better products. When convenient pervasive networking became possible, online commerce made it easier to buy more new stuff and social media made it more desirable. All these things seem like positive feedback loops that reinforce each other.
I think it may take a change in the way we interact with devices to finally break away from the old paradigms. Moving from desktops to laptops to phones and tablets didn't seem to break the habit. Perhaps something else will arrive to do that.
When I was at college, the computing department had just got some bug beefy VAXes for students to use (BSD Unix) and they were considered the bees knees. Also got to try out VMS on microvaxes - again, in retrospect I wish I could have learned more about VMS.
These days, the VAX ISA appears to be considered as an prime example of going 'over the top' and something that could never seriously be implemented using modern cpu techniques. But VMS seems to live on - it is currently being ported to x86 and looks like the company doing it will honour the spirit of DEC in having a free hobbyist programme for it.
You’re right about the shift in GUIs for mobile devices. In the case of iOS, I’ve never been sure how much it differs from OS X for the programmer (not having done MacOS/iOS development). At least Apple avoided the pitfall of trying to push too much of the mobile gui onto the desktop; MS found that one out the hard way.
Comments 7
Once it became possible to produce computers whose purpose was not just "computing" for its own sake, it opened up the mass market for computing devices. Even before then, consumerism drove demand for ever better products. When convenient pervasive networking became possible, online commerce made it easier to buy more new stuff and social media made it more desirable. All these things seem like positive feedback loops that reinforce each other.
I think it may take a change in the way we interact with devices to finally break away from the old paradigms. Moving from desktops to laptops to phones and tablets didn't seem to break the habit. Perhaps something else will arrive to do that.
Reply
We did get a massive change in how we interact: smartphones and tablets.
It wasn't enough.
I think next, maybe, the shift to large-scale non-volatile memory, AKA persistent memory -- may be our last chance.
Reply
Reply
Reply
When I was at college, the computing department had just got some bug beefy VAXes for students to use (BSD Unix) and they were considered the bees knees. Also got to try out VMS on microvaxes - again, in retrospect I wish I could have learned more about VMS.
These days, the VAX ISA appears to be considered as an prime example of going 'over the top' and something that could never seriously be implemented using modern cpu techniques. But VMS seems to live on - it is currently being ported to x86 and looks like the company doing it will honour the spirit of DEC in having a free hobbyist programme for it.
You’re right about the shift in GUIs for mobile devices. In the case of iOS, I’ve never been sure how much it differs from OS X for the programmer (not having done MacOS/iOS development). At least Apple avoided the pitfall of trying to push too much of the mobile gui onto the desktop; MS found that one out the hard way.
Reply
Reply
Leave a comment