Frivolous Friday, 04.02.2010: I/T irony

Working in information technology typically runs a bit more smoothly if you have a developed sense of humor. Okay, maybe gallows humor, but humor. It occurred to me this morning that if you stick around long enough, you should enjoy the beneficial side effect of a healthy inoculation against irony. Here a are a few reasons why:

When you read books like L. Sprague de Camp's "The Ancient Engineers" or Frances & Joseph Gies' "Cathedral, Forge & Water-wheel," you're struck by how many technologies were born as the toys of kings & emperors. (Astrology, for instance, eventually moved beyond fortune-telling or personality assessment to revolutionize our concept of the Universe.) In contrast, "modern" computers were developed for naval ballistics and core business functions such as accounting and payroll. Nowadays, conventional wisdom is that computing's envelope is being pushed by gaming and pr0n.

Microsoft based its fortunes on an operating system--i.e. a mechanism for managing files and running applications. Three decades later, Windows XP can't delete a zero-byte file without the notification icon hanging until I'm annoyed enough to click "Cancel."

And while I'm picking on Microsoft, there's always Bill Gates at the center of an urban legend that has him proclaiming that "640 kilobytes should be enough for anyone." Windows 7 requires over 1600 times that--over 3200 if the processor is 64-bit. The much-despised Vista's--widely panned for its bloatedness--had half memory requirement (512MB for the Home version; 1GB for everything else).

The popular image of the Mac user is still the free-spirited artist, despite the fact that Steve Jobs' design dictatorship is largely celebrated as a virtue.

I was testing the battery life on a brand-new netbook by keeping it on the kitchen counter as I worked on other things. "Are you storing your recipes on that?" my husband snarked in reference to the history of personal computing.

This isn't an original thought, but as long as we're on the subject of PC history, remember the prediction that the PC would be as simple to use as the telephone? Now whole books are published on the subject of how to use name brand smartphones.

The reason that the telephone was the model of ease of use in those days was, of course, that it had to be simple enough for your Mom & Grandma to use. Now, I'm sure that there are any number of exceptions, but I'm willing to bet that most of us who do informal PC support would much rather troubleshoot for them than any number of other "adults" we could mention. (Why? Because Mom & Grandma can be trusted to follow directions. Heck, Mom & Grandma probably even read the manual cover to cover, thus sparing us a goodly percentage of the calls we would otherwise have fielded.)

There are roughly one billion people online, yet certain oppressive governments [insert scowl in the direction of Beijing], corporations and loony-tunes fringe movements somehow believe that they can sway the discourse by creating fake identities and astro-turfing.