Al Mandel used to say “the step after ubiquity is invisibility” and man was he right about that. Above you’ll see a chart from the Google Computers and Electronics Index, which shows the ranking of queries using words like “Windows, Apple, HP, xBox, iPad” — you get the picture. The actual terms have changed a bit since the index started in 2004 as products and companies have come and gone, but my point here is the general decline.
Just as Al predicted, as technology has become more vital to our lives we’ve paradoxically become less interested, or at least do less reaching out. Maybe this is because technologies become easier to use over time or we have more local knowledge (our kids and co-workers helping us do things we might have had to search on before).
Whatever the reason, I think it is mirrored in the decline of specialist technology publications. What happened to BYTE Magazine? Actually the last editor of BYTE, my friend Rafe Needleman, is the new editor of Make Magazine (there were a number of steps in between for Rafe) so maybe there are technology search upticks like 3D printing and Raspberry Pi computers just as we yawn over Windows 10 or iOS 9.
Where it was once enough to be a user, maybe the geeks among us now need to be masters. It’s an ironic return not to the PC glory days of the 90s, but to the PC experimenter days of the 70s. Or so it seems. Whatever the reason, we’re certainly more blasé than we used to be about this stuff that has come to absolutely control our lives.
Weird, eh?
I think a tiny minority of people were interested in advanced technology back in the day (e.g. Byte subscribers) and the same is true now. It’s just that while the line between “advanced technology” and “mundane stuff everyone uses” moves along as usual, for awhile it straddled technology that we computer nerds cared about. Now it’s moved on. The analogy with cars is old and tired, but nonetheless on point: in 1905 only inventors messed with the things, by 1970 a huge number of people knew how to (and needed to), and in the 21st century they’ve crossed over to “invisible” — too reliable to make it worth your while to learn how to hack ’em, and complicated enough that the effort is a major investment rather than common knowledge.
Warranty systems might have had something to do with that, though – that way of making people not *want* to look at the innards of what they have. In the 70s, car parts could be looked at because there were no real onboard computers (though cruise control was on its way). Today, cars are as much controlled and regulated by software. Cracking your car “open” would invalidate your warranty.
So too, software and hardware. People are told “if you break this seal, you void the warranty”, and that had an effect on people’s attitudes to what goes on. After years of being told “you’ll owe us money if you look inside there”, of course nobody wants to look inside there anymore.
Curiosity itself has been penalized. (and yes, it is not a stretch to extend that to how education, especially in rural areas, is reflective of that attitude as well.)
I’m not sure that search frequency is the metric I’d use to gauge interest in technology. I’m as excited about tech today as I was in the early 2000s, when we got cool stuff like Active Directory and Group Policy. Today, we’ve got a variety of truly mobile solutions, and sync makes it ever-easier to just move seamlessly between them. Today, it will be 3:15 when I notice a calendar reminder for my 3:00 dentist appointment. By the end of 2015, Cortana will be shouting at me by 2:30. All kinds of amazing things are here now, or on the horizon. But none of that has me doing extra searches, or reading anything beyond my normal sources of tech news.
Funny comment. Billions of transistors in your hand, and all it’s good for is remembering appointments. That perfectly explains why tech has lost it’s excitement. A few scientists are mapping galaxies or modeling complex systems. But for the rest of humanity it’s just mindless time wasting — games, text messaging, celeb gossip or cat videos on puke tube.
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Gee, I can hardly wait to see what cool new feature microsoft has in the next version of widows or office. How many of you so-called tech people have even noticed all they do is slap a new coat of lipstick on their fat, ugly old hag?
I don’t agree, Mark. I use all those transistors for computer spreadsheets, word processing, voice transcribing, creating and watching videos, creating and reading Kindle books, programming, income tax returns, keeping my company books, searching the Internet, etc., etc.
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As for new features, you don’t have to rely on Microsoft. There are always new possibilities for online education, artificial intelligence, robots, etc., etc. No one knows what may develop over the next ten or twenty years.
I think Mark is responding to DaveN’s Microsoft-centric world.
Yep, me too. But you also know those apps have been around for 20-30 years. Nothing really new, which is why tech isn’t exciting any more.
Your buttblast over MS stuff is delicious.
You`re sitting before billions of transistors, and all you can do is wail about Office changing interface once in ten years.
If you add in “android” or “ios” or “iphone” or “raspberry pi” does this change things?
I think we probably pay lots of attention to technology, maybe not just PCs, but now mobile too.
Thank god for Make Magazine and the Raspberry Pi, they have made computing interesting again. I use to read Byte, Creative Computing and others, cover to cover. Who remembers typing in code from the magazines, or the Cat scanner that would scan code?
Computing was an adventure then. my first computer was a Sinclair zx-80, kids had to want to learn about computers then. Today most use iPads play games or chat with friends. Judging by all the apps, there are still adventures out there, they are just being drowned out but the white noise their apps have have created.
Interesting point. It seems the platform is becoming less interesting – at least until Google Glass or Hololens or Magic Leap finally enable the shift from the half-century paradigm of screens.
Until that happens, attention is focussed further up the stack. At present, I’m really interested in how Apple Music is going to steal Spotify’s lunch money, purely through having a superior product. Here in Australia Spotify’s streams are down 40%+ already, with Apple now reporting more streams than Spotify.
My friend in the music business says its all about the human-curated playlists…
Nope, it’s all about human-created HYPE. I remember back in 1999 — yes, last century — heads up display glasses were going to be sweep the market for Xmas sales. Never went on sale. My personal guess was that they caused users big headaches or dizziness. This tech is more over hyped than the flying car of the 60s.
I think this observation can be applied to other things. With cars 20 or 30 years ago there was a rich market for “upgrade” parts. “Tuning” your car was important. Many of the critical components that made the engine operate (carburetor, distributor, etc) needed regular attention. A good mechanic was a godsend. They had many tricks and techniques to diagnose your car. Many car owners has some knowledge of their cars and did their own maintenance.
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Then cars were computerized. The computers now do real time adjustments to the fuel flow and ignition. Engines are now more efficient and pollute much less. Cars usually lasted about 70,000 miles. Today I have two cars approaching 200,000 miles. For the most part this has been a good thing. The bad thing is most people no longer know much about their cars. Cars just go. Many mechanics don’t have the diagnostic skills of their predecessors. A light goes on on your dash, the mechanic plugs in a device and reads the codes from the cars computer. He then replaces some parts based on those codes. Mechanics today often let the cars computer do all their thinking. They can’t diagnose a subtle problem with a car’s cooling system. or find and fix an electrical problem.
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We’ve lost interest and a deep understand how the drive chain in a car works. Our cars today are so well engineered and run so well, we rarely need to know much more than to buy gas and get an occasional oil change. Is this progress? Maybe this has led to a decline of interest in engineering. Kids never see someone repair or rebuild an engine. They don’t visualize how an engine works. They don’t dream about how it could be better. They don’t dream about studying about these things in college.
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With all due respect, as someone in the computer industry who is also an automtove gearhead (and has kept up with automotive development/maintenance/tuning over all these years), you are quite wrong….while it’s true that today’s cars don’t need as much routine/periodic MAINTENANCE as they did previously (due not only to computer/digital controls but also just to plain old advances in materials and manufacture techniques), the area of learning about mechanics, tuning your car, and modifying it for better performance are being embraced by young people as much as ever before.
Notwitstanding the incredible advances (and increased complexity) due to microprocessor software-controlled operatons for all of a car’s systems nowadays, the basics of a plain old gasoline-powered automobile are still the same….take in air and fuel and mix it and combust it (and exhaust it) to go, rubber on the road, friction-based brakes to stop it, spring and damper based suspensions to manage the chassis’s operation on the road, and a metal body for passengers. That hasn’t changed since the 70’s (and earlier), and the new adaptive digital software controls and actuators that have advanced this functionality to an increble new level have actually added an interesting new aspect to learn and tune above and beyond the plain old mechnical basics.
These adaptive systems come from the factory with a pretty narrow range of “mapped” operation, and thus there’s a whole gaggle of young kids (I know because I teach some of them) who are not only learning about the mechanical/fuel/electrical systems we gearheads learned about in the 70’s, they are also becoming expert software analysts/programmers as they learn the sofware side of automotive tuning and maintenance in todays 21st-century cars. It’s fascinating stuff.
So, with no disrespect to you, I’m getting kind of tired hearing that cars are too complicated today and that nobody can work on them and that today’s kids aren’t interested in them. Not true. The software side of it adds a VERY interesting new (and wonderful) side to it, but the basics are still the same, and young men (and a few women) are still interested and learning about it.
IOW…plenty of kids are still interested and want to learn how to “repair or rebuild an engine.” They DO “visualize how an engine works.” And the way a drive chain works hasn’t changed in 75 years (other than digital controls to allow changes in cam timing or automatic tensioning). There may be an overall lessening of American kids interested in engineering in general, but that’s not limited to the automotive field nor do I think its due to computerization).
I think a sea change in the public relationship with technology comes from an increased willingness to use low-quality products with pretty wrapping (including social confirmation) and to consider these sub-par tools “good enough.” I can see this in apps (Snapchat etc.), social networks (Ello etc.), practices (encrypted email? ha!), and more. Snapchat and Ello have improved over time, but they reached critical mass for viral growth long before they were of reasonable technical quality to deserve that popularity on technical merits (if they even are now).
If those I interact with regularly are any indication, people — including younger generations — are as influenced by their low standards as they are technology ubiquity. If there is merit in the stereotype of youth being particularly apathetic today, apathy toward all aspects of technology will keep younger generations from supporting the alternative “getting help from your kids” stereotype.
Acceptance of barely-sufficient tools and apathy about pushing boundaries is also evident from low, and possibly declining, “computer literacy” — again including younger generations. Texting, whether SMS or via an app like Kik, requires almost no literacy. Knowing how to install an app and use it is only “literate” at the simplest level. Checking Facebook regularly requires a dull mind, not literacy.
Our capabilities have exploded over the past 20 years but the usage of those capabilities has not kept pace. If you have teens or young adults in your family, query them about just how much they seek to use technology for all it’s worth (i.e., beyond just installing and using apps). There will always be exceptions; there will always be those who are unwilling to take whatever garbage is presented with the right polish and insist on real quality (and also push capability boundaries). Whether that minority is shrinking is up for debate.
Bob, I wonder what the comparable trend line would be for software operating systems. I recall the many times you proffered that an invention/technology takes 30 years to get to the ubiquity stage. (See telegraph, telephone, etc.) Seems to me that the object of geek desire has shifted from hardware to software/platforms/capabilities. Alas, one thing that’s different is that back in the 70s I think the primary motivation was trying to figure out how to make something do what you wanted it to do. Now maybe the motivation is still that, but diluted by dollars. (Note to self: go back and watch “Triumph of the Nerds” and “Internet 2.0.”
This measures the queries relative to total U.S. searches, from what I can see. If so, it would reflect the increase in non-IT users of the Internet over time.
Kind of reminds me of airplanes. Folks of all kinds used to be interested in propeller planes, then came jets and the underlying complexity became too much for people. Airshows declined. I think there was a sense that a propeller aircraft was something a person could understand, perhaps fix and certainly use. Jets on the other hand were too complicated to understand or fix and even use.
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Frankly the computer industry abandoned the hobbyist segment by closing the box. Apple of course has famously tried to invent it all as a vertically integrated company, but even Windows PCs became sealed containers and expansion boards died.
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Arduino and Raspberry Pi kind of bring back that Byte Magazine spirit. The cloud is the jet airplane of today.
That so-called “closing the box” has lead to many times more people being able to use computing technology, though. Just look at people using smartphones in Africa, India, etc., and how many more people now access the Internet via their phone than *ever* accessed it via a PC. This is only possible because there’s less need to figure out how to get inside the device and keep it working.
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It’s the difference between having an electrical infrastructure and being able to just plug in a lamp or electric heater, and needing to know how to start a fire just to provide light and heat.
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We still have people going out camping, though, and learning how to properly assemble and light tinder, kindling, and sticks for a campfire.
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The makers of today are the scouting groups of yesterday.
In the late 80’s my dufus friend drove his kingswood into a tree. Between three of us we managed to pull the frontend off, replace the radiator, water pump, new grill, bumper, all the wiring and then drove the bloody thing form Melbourne to Perth. And we were drinking most of the time.
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Nowadays I open a bonnet and cant see the ground beneath the engine.
The Kingswood!? You’re not taking the Kingswood! I just chrome plated the dipstick.
*aussie joke*
And I just vacuumed out the glovebox.
Re: “managed to pull the frontend off, replace the radiator, water pump, new grill, bumper, all the wiring and then drove the bloody thing”. I recently saw a Latino comedian describe that as Mexican insurance, used at the scene of an accident.
For the last 4 years I’ve made a full time living off my electronics engineering Youtube channel, and I’m sure that wouldn’t have been possible without the whole recent maker/hacker/hobbyist/OSHW/experimenter revolution.
If you asked anyone a little over 10 years ago was hobby electronics and experimenting dead, you’d get few doubters. It was all consumer gadgets and games.
Now it is very 1970’s/80’s all over again, people love building stuff again, it’s awesome!
This is a great vlog, I go there on a regular basis looking for new stuff, it’s a great vlog, fun, reviews retro stuff too, great fun and educational
Technology IS exciting Bob, it’s just that you are on VHF and the stuff is happening on UHF. Read https://news.ycombinator.com/news every now and then and fall in love all over again. 🙂
It’s been pretty well accepted for years now that the basic shape of IT has reached a plateau. There hasn’t been anything remotely resembling the excitement around the genesis of the “home computer” in the 1970s and 1980s, followed by the coming home of the Internet in the 1990s. What’s really changed about computing since then? Not much. Hardware has gotten faster and storage has gotten bigger, but not so much so that revolutionary changes have been observed. It’s a no-brainer that faster processors and bigger hard drives are better, but this isn’t “exciting,” it’s just the gradual process of technology refining itself. In terms of software, the recent versions of Windows are mostly cosmetic changes. People tout this feature and that feature, but the basic face of Windows and what people use it for hasn’t changed since Windows 95, released 20 years ago, which standardized our expectations of what a PC desktop acts like.
Personally, I don’t buy into mobile as being a real game-changer. People are still using their smartphones for the same things they used their PCs for; the only thing that’s different is that the PCs now fit into your pocket and you can carry them around with you, using them in a restaurant, taxi, or bus. That’s convenient, but it doesn’t really enable people to do anything they couldn’t do before. The Raspberry Pi is a neat device, but like the Arduino, it’s mostly a toy limited to the hobbyist market. It hasn’t gotten (and likely will not get) significant attention from the corporate world, and even for personal use, it has appeal only to the bitheads who like to play with electronic toys. That’s a significant market, but again, it’s nothing compared to the market that opened up to the PC in the 1980s. 3D printing could potentially be a game changer, but it has a long way to go before it gets there.
Other people here have already made comparisons to cars and airplanes, and I think these comparisons are valid. Compare the incredible excitement around the development of the airplane about 100 years ago with the state of the airplane today. It wasn’t that long ago that people were predicting that personal aircraft would be as ubiquitous as personal cars. How many people own an airplane today? It turned out that it just wasn’t very practical to do so. The airplane is a great technology, but the fundamental state of the jumbo jet and the airline industry hasn’t changed much in decades, aside from increased security tensions in the post-9/11 world and ridiculous airline fees becoming more prevalent as profit margins decline and competition in the industry becomes more brutal. Similarly, cars and what people use them for have remained functionally the same since the 1950s. There isn’t really anywhere to take these fundamental concepts from here. There are still car shows and car magazines for the enthusiasts, but these only hold appeal for a minority of people. For the general public, cars, airplanes, and computers are today no more exciting than streetlamps. We might as well just accept that the glory days of progress and growth are mostly behind us. The time has come (in fact, it arrived years ago) to stop thinking about technology as something cool for nerds to show off with, and to start thinking of making it stable and practical.
Agree !
The real culprit is the internet. Before the net, one of the more exciting things about a personal computer was the ways it could be made to compute. (You could also do double entry bookkeeping on a PC, but that wasn’t very exciting. To most.)
Then the internet happened. Now, a young ‘un on a personal computing device will find games, porn, social (and pseudo-social) experiences, websites, movies, all of which is more exciting (to most) than the machinery ticking underneath.
There’s no “solution” to this one, no society will dismantle the net. (Well, maybe, someday, one or three decades into the future, some will. But that’s not going to be about making PCs exciting again.)
So are you saying that modern day computers cannot “be made to compute” in as many ways as older computers? Really? I put it to you that there are actually now many more tools which are more available to all sorts of users, for programming or any other type of activity on current computers than there were in the old days. The question is what people choose to do with their computer time. For many of us, the choice was to do programming, but for the vast majority, that was never much of an option, due to inclination or proficiency. Those who couldn’t or weren’t interested in tinkering had less stuff available to do with computers than they do now, plain and simple. That has changed, and computers are as exciting as ever, in my book, and probably moreso to a great many computers users.
It really depends on what you mean by “computing.” I can’t pretend to know exactly what Greg had in mind with his comment, but for me at least, what was interesting about PCs used to be how you could explore them down to their core. Back in the days before Windows, people manually poked values into the registers of their video cards to create experimental non-standard video modes, they changed the timing values on the interval timers to play digitized sound through the PC’s internal speaker (which had been designed to only play single-tone square-wave audio), and it was even relatively feasible for a dedicated hobbyist to make their own expansion cards back in the days when ISA was indeed the industry standard, thereby tapping into most of the key signals of the computer’s internal control bus. (By contrast, it’s not really feasible for a hobbyist working at home to make a PCI or PCI-X card.) These kinds of tricks and techniques are just not viable today, because things like protected mode are designed to prevent user software from having that kind of direct access to the hardware. The only thing that software can do today is grovel for whatever function calls are made available to it from the operating system. That can be fun too, of course, and there are plenty of fascinating applications that are built out of those function calls, but a lot of people (myself included) miss the days when computers had more to do with electrical engineering and less to do with function libraries, because back then computing was more about math and science, whereas today it’s more about business and commerce.
Look at it like a behaviorist: The personal computer is a “stimulus”. When you see it, what is the most reinforced, most exciting “response”, the thing you think of doing with it? Before the net, comparably not that much besides the few applications you bought at the store, unless you went into the machine as such, e.g., programming it, which was a limitless landscape of relatively exciting things to do. After the net, there’s no limit to more reinforcing stuff you find by just clicking, i.e. with far less effort.
The net didn’t make the computer less programmable, but it too many options into viable alternatives to tinkering with the machine as such, and to most, those options are more exciting than the machine itself: The porn, the browser games, the blogs, the social and pseudo-social experiences, the movies, everything out there.
(As a secondary effect, before the net, if you decided on some project to do-it-yourself on a personal computer, it used to be that you’d be pretty satisfied with your result. Now? Google what you’re about to do, and you find that you can download the solution and it is better than what you’d have done in weeks of your own time.)
Since nobody considers owning their personal computers without connecting them to the internet, there goes the former fascination with the machine itself.
Don Lancaster said that for some, Visicalc was the best computer game ever.
Now it would be Excel, of course.
Toasters. Electric toasters were once novel and I’m sure consumers were excited to have them initially. Now everyone has one and they cost about $20. No one is excited about a toaster. Few people know how to make one or to fix one that’s broken, but they are cheap enough to be disposable. Computers and technology are toasters.
For many years, I built PCs for the people in my town. I would meet each customer and discus specs. The main talking point was technical things like how much RAM, CPU speed, hard drive size and video card resolution. Then about 10 years ago, I realised that such a conversation was completely irrelevant. The PCs were so powerful that they could do pretty much anything and the main talking point was how it looked.
After a while i stopped making them and moved onto other things.
Toasters or a commodity that’s all hardware is. Apple makes tons just redesigning hardware to make it cool, everyone else copies tham. The OS’s have for the most part stabilized. The real value is and will always be the data and who controls it.
Computers used to cost two to five thousand dollars. So people learned more about repairing them.
The demise of specialist tech magazines is lamentable, but most of the good writers for those publications are still writing about the same things. With a decent, curated favorites tab you can open a dozen or so web sites with one click and get your fill. EvenJerry Pournelle’s good old Chaos Manor is still available including its charming mid 90’s design. The problem for me is that all the tinkering is gone. Therefore the hobbyist and discovery element is gone for all but those interested n the most arcane topics. Most enthusiast community sites have become kvetching and bug solving discussions.
I am part of this downward trend. I used to read Cringely’s column every week in the 90’s. The present site is now in a second tier of tabs that I visit less than once per month. I used to visit the computer web sites (mostly Apple) every day. Now it’s maybe once per week. I used to subscribe to an embarrassing number of tech podcasts–some running to over two hours. Now I subscribe to a couple and won’t listen to anything for more than about a half hour–and it better be funny! Meanwhile I have other interests and am happy to satisfy those.
Byte. Man, almost 20 years later and I still miss Byte. Dr. Dobbs, too. I dropped PC Magazine and Linux Journal when they went all digital.
I’m amazed at how prescient Robert Persig was in Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He described exactly this situation, calling it the Classical vs Romantic, and pointing to the Romantics’ combined dependence on and fear of technology. Re-read (or read) the book and you’ll be surprised how well it holds up. I’m merely re-reading it by coincidence for a book club. I think you’ll enjoy it again.
What you were saying is true.
And yes I do remember when technology was exciting.
For me it was 1999.
I just lost my job at BF Goodrich research laboratory doing water-based
polymer adhesive stuff.
I had an old 386 computer that I scarfed up from somewhere to put on my desk.
I lost my job along with 149 others there because our division president told us BFG needed to save $15,000,000 to remain “competitive”. A few weeks later our newspaper reported that the top executives of Goodrich AND the North Carolina company they were about to merge with were getting bonuses totaling $15,000,000!
And just prior to this I hated computer technology so much that I avoided it especially DOS windows stuff.
In my job prior to this our R&D department for MacTac adhesives had just gotten one computer that we all shared.
I was forced to do my reports on it and I hated every minute of it.
Or at least every few minutes because that’s when I would get stuck and have
to stop and check with the one guy who had a computer in his home who knew the answers to get the microcomputer as it was called then, working again.
Just prior to my layoff in 1999 I decided to embrace this technology and so I took a computer repair course at Stark State College near North Canton Ohio.
It was one night a week and our teacher was great, a guy named Bill Love.
He taught me to love computer repair and DOS and windows.
When I was roaming the halls and doing some studying I noticed
a medium size crowd in the main auditorium and I saw that the sign said that they were the Akron Canton PC users group.
I sheepishly stuck my head in and a guy named Jerry talked to me and invited me in.
I figured these guys knew a lot more about computers than I did because I just started taking only my second computer repair course.
They figured I knew more than them.
It struck me that this auditorium looked so much like the pictures I had seen
of the auditorium that the Homebrew Club met in at Stanford
I saw those pictures because I got so interested in computer technology that I read every book about the history of this business that I could find including one minor work called Accidental Empires.
Just kidding it was a great read Bob.
That summer of 1999 Turner broadcasting was pre-screening a film at that auditorium at Stark State that was going to be broadcast the the following week.
Of course it was Pirates of Silicon Valley.
It was an exciting time and my friend Tom and I got the last two available seats in that pretty good-sized auditorium I think.
When it was broadcast the following week my then girlfriend Diane suffered through me and her watching that movie on her TV.
I remember because when the movie was over TBS was just about to restart it a second time.
I remember Diane saying oh no I’m not watching this again.
Alone I think I’ve watched it many times.
Excitement? I’d say so.
Monday I just came home from the current meeting of the Akron Canton PC users group and we were barely able to scrape together a half a dozen of us.
Yes technology has become a commodity, but for some of us, a darn few of us, it’s still exciting.
PS
We had some of that excitement rekindled when the Woz accepted my invitation for lunch here in Akron the year after he was inducted into the inventors Hall of Fame.
Even last year he said he still remembers that great luncheon held in a converted railroad train car as the best he’s been to. (Thanks for lying Woz to make us feel good).
When Steve agreed to meet us for lunch many in our group were as giddy as a bunch of teenage boys about to see Pink dance in the nude.
On Jul 13, 2015, at 4:27 PM, I, Cringely wrote:
I, Cringely
Remember when technology was exciting?
GoogleGraph
Al Mandel used to say “the step after ubiquity is invisibility” and man was he right about that. Above you’ll see a chart from the Google Computers and Electronics Index, which shows the ranking of queries using words like “Windows, Apple, HP, xBox, iPad” — you get the picture. The actual terms have changed a bit since the index started in 2004 as products and companies have come and gone, but my point here is the general decline.
Just as Al predicted, as technology has become more vital to our lives we’ve paradoxically become less interested, or at least do less reaching out. Maybe this is because technologies become easier to use over time or we have more local knowledge (our kids and co-workers helping us do things we might have had to search on before).
Whatever the reason, I think it is mirrored in the decline of specialist technology publications. What happened to BYTE Magazine? Actually the last editor of BYTE, my friend
Coincidentally, I was reading this yesterday.
Science as a Craft Industry
Freeman J. Dyson
https://www.sciencemag.org/content/280/5366/1014.full
Speaking of Byte Magazine… I found this yesterday: https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Byte_Magazine.htm
This organization has scanned several publications on radio, TV, early PC’s, and other subjects. You can find articles from the 1930’s to the point the went out of business. Most of the Popular Electronics and Radio-Electronics publications have been scanned. Including this one:
https://www.americanradiohistory.com/Archive-Poptronics/70s/1975/Poptronics-1975-01.pdf
Yes, very true. I think there is a tendency these days for people to confuse knowing how to use something, with knowing how it actually works, and as a result, people are becoming blase about it. For example, I’m sure you’ve all heard the comments about how “technology literate” all the Gen Xers and Gen Yers, and small kids are, just because they know how to use a computer, email, and an iPad. In actual fact, they have no idea how it actually works (i.e., coding, processor, etc). Kind of sad, but Al Mandel seems to be right on the money.
I have so many luncheons and dinners that I barely remember any venues as being special. But back then I didn’t have such fan meetings often and, as strange as it sounds, that one was probably the most memorable of all. It had to do with my state of mind and not thinking there’d be something like a trolley car where we were that was a restaurant. I was younger and didn’t think there were any such, outside of the Old Spaghetti Factory. It was really a delightful lunch that had to be squeezed into my schedule. Dave’s enthusiasm really made it. Bottom line is I was not lying.
Thinking about the 80s and 90s and the glory daze of form factor excitement and obsession, it’s easy to forget how slow…. everything was. Dial-up: You paid them, to waste, your time.. Why is this thing taking so long to get going… ?!?%#* Nevertheless, I heartily and nostalgically agree with everything others (the retro RAM romantics bloc) have said in this great stroll down memory lane. Pong, the Charlie Chaplin character in the 80s IBMs TV commercials, Commodore 64, DOS, Sega VR. I remember seeing the Apple IIc for the first time in 1984 and couldn’t believe how cool it looked… Small pleasures eh..? Very small… pleasures. Like the 1979 song Video Killed the Radio Star, agree totally with the poster who linked the late 90s Internet tidal wave (more like a galaxy exploding, computing wise) with the demise of tinker ready/tinker fertile hardware. Internet -> content(s) hypnosis, form factor/device amnesia. The dot com VC gilded period and pursuant mass making of millionaires was perhaps the watershed IT mini-era that cemented the proprietary focus and ownership mentality within the computing industry that effectively sealed/ locked down hardware (as others wrote about above) for good. Tinker ban: Instated. Instagram, ‘just Tweeted’, Angry Birds, friending, the newest iPhone lines: Naturally… these just don’t seem to be able to fire the computing imagination for the tactile inclined pack of computer hardware geeks and artisans.
Re: “Weird, eh?” I have another explanation of what appears to be declining queries about tech. It’s not declining at all. It’s just that the keywords surveyed are so general that people have stopped using them. Years ago, I would include common search terms in my query like “Windows 98” or “Microsoft” but I now find it good enough to type in a phrase like “error 80244019”. In other words there is so much tech info to sort through, that it helps to be as specific as possible, and pointless to use a search term that is included in the survey.
I too, find that being in the IT field for some 25 years now that I have become underwhelmed by much of the tech–particularly hardware–that I used to follow closely.
I feel like much of the overall trend may be more of a reflection of the TYPE of people doing the searches over time. Initially, it was a nerd-heavy population. Those of us who read Bob, for example. Today, the Internet if full of people like my mother-in-law, who uses search engines to find information about quilting.
Technology is still exciting for the gamers, makers, and DIY builders. But the big computer brands that sell machines at big box retailers such as Wal Mart and Best Buy have been selling overpriced mediocre computers that are unable to run the latest video games. The consumer computer brands have shifted development towards tablets and smartphones.
The computers that are capable of playing the latest video games require the fastest CPUs, fastest GPUs, maximum memory, fast SSDs, great soundcards, and fast connectivity. Unfortunately for the next generation of computer enthusiasts, such configurations are prohibitively expensive. Go to a gamer builder website such as Cyberpower, iBuyPower, Alienware, etc., and dream-build a gamer machine, which is what you need to be competitive in online games, and you’ll see those machines can be quite expensive. Only the children of the upper middle class can afford to spend the thousands of dollars needed on expensive video cards, CPUs and memory configurations.
In the 1980s and 1990s, the prices seemed less steep to build a competitive gaming computer. As the prices rose for the gamer computers, fewer people can get into the hobby of DIY assembled computers.
To see the next generation of tech entrepreneurs, check out the computer video game conferences and expos. Those consumers are pushing the technology. That’s where the next Nolan Bushnell, Wozniak and Jobs will be.
one big difference is that computers and operating systems are not really open and learning tools, but instead tools of the corporations
This is only getting worse, the government mandates you use Windows instead of Linux
And there is no open hardware or software
Android and iOS are both closed
That is a big difference between the PC and micro computer days with open hardware and open Linux
Now it’s all closed and closing more every day
The other problem too is that the Internet has become a tools of corporations too, not just the computers, neither are a users tool any more
The Internet should provide the same exploring capability of the PC or better but it does not, for the same reasons
Sometimes there is good content, but it’s still manipulated
Back in time I used to write my own computer programs for everything I needed. Now I am way older and had to prune my interests. No more time to watch baseball or basketball games. Why to write my own program when I can download better for free from the download web site or ios or android store?
There will always be a place for people doing those things but not if you are married have kids career and life.
New cars you can not touch any more because they cancel warranty as soon as they notice you opened the hood.
There has also been a turn in policy
We used to have room full, auditorium full of Linux people, today we could not do the same if we wanted to for security reasons
Instead of having good search engines, the search engines and computers watch you
Then there is the h1b visas that take the jobs so people loose interst
So a lot of this is policy for security reasons for your own benefit, which is deteramental to the industry and making money
Today you don’t have the freedom to even fire up a Linux machine in the government, they say it’s a security threat, unlike windows
So a lot of this is policy, which is not good for the country or the people, and the know how and enthusiasm is lost
Then the magazines are canceled as are the web sites related to Linux for no apparent reason
People need to be vigilant for jobs and what is going on but they are not
So corporate government runs things instead importing third world labour deteriorating working conditions
Is it any wonder with so many barriers ethusiamsunm is not lost ?
1) It is relative. PCs – the computer – most of us still consider ‘computers’ are > 35 years old. On the other hand, virtual reality (oculus rift), AI, robotics, 3D printing and the internet of things really are exciting.
2) I suspect that one thing that takes the wow factor out of new tech is that the ability to create new reality. The 1st Star Wars changed the world. A movie like Gravity only interest you for a few hours at most.
3) There is a bit of a double edged sword about humans. When we make the extraordinary ordinary, the extraordinary is lost. We live in a sea of extraordinary technologies. It does not phase us to say that you can talk to someone around the world, or safely put someone to sleep for surgery, or carry a device that can access billions of pieces of information, or lift something that weighs many tons with a push of a button. Go back and have a conversation with Jules Verne and see what he would think of our world.
Several years ago when my kids were approaching High School I asked Bob and a number of friends some questions:
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What field of study, what professions should a young person consider for their career?
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What are the industries and technologies that will enjoy long term growth and prosperity through our kids life times?
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After watching the engineering profession get wiped out in the 1980’s and the IT profession more recently, I was concerned. All of the big employers have been downsizing their staffs and shipping work offshore for years. A quick peek at the UAW employment numbers over the last 40 years tells a very chilling story. You don’t have to be pro-union or anti-union to realize that losing millions of middle class manufacturing jobs can’t be good for an economy. The problem was EVERY industry has been doing the same thing. So where are our kids supposed to work?
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What this chart shows us is the “next big thing” in technology has become invisible. What is the next, next big thing? This is an important question for the USA and most of the world. What is going to drive economic growth and provide jobs in the future?
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As Jim Lovell said during the Apollo 13 mission: “Houston. We have a problem.”
One problem is corporations importing as many Hindus as they can to put Americans out of work
Not every country does this, this is not a for gone conclusion, it doesn’t have to be the is way, this is a U.S. corporate government decision, about which the people do nothing
The end result of pursuing poor policies is something like Greece, but the U.S. can just print more money and import more labour
Everyone sees there is a problem, no one understands what it is
On is closed systems, or subverted systems, so you can’t explore, both Internet and computers
The other is replacing American workers with Hindus eliminating the human capital and know how that the U.S. Has
Last but not least the security measures that watch people and provide poor search results, and stop people from congregating
It’s a sad mixture of factors promoted by business and government all of which are very destructive
All designed for control and profit, and that is the underlying problem
The U.S. could have taken an opposite route and educated everyone and had full employment, instead we are secure and stupid
Small typo I think: “maybe the geeks among us now need to be masters.” I’m pretty sure you meant “makers” not “masters”.
As a retired 70s geek, I want to spend my time making gadgets. “Mastering” them seems so 2008ish.
I love how little people know about computers. It makes me feel secure with my Unix sysadmin job. I work for a large hospital group in Chicago. You would be surprised how many “Requests For Service” come my way for things like copying files and creating directories. Yes, I said “creating directories.”
When something is new we accept that their will be problems during it’s development, I think that’s the way many people regarded Microsoft. We knew when Windows first came out that there would be problems but that was forgiven, with new major features being added all the time then it was easy to forgive., since XP there really hasn’t been anything to bite the back of your hand with and say, ‘ I really want that ‘, instead we are subjected to average new features, incredible bloatware, half working features, a ever changing UI, tons of updates, lousy recovery options, lousy license agreements, privacy invasion, forced upgrades, nag nag nag, junkware at epidemic level, updates that can hose a modern version of Windows beyond repair. Nope, a just can’t think why I find technology less exciting these days…
How much of the technology these days is big versus small corporations? There’s a LOT of small apps out there and even bigger need for apps. There’s all these exciting startups and new gizmo’s (tile, karma, wearable tech…and none of these are anything like good yet).
Music went from a few big to uncountably numerous small. Text based media is pretty much that way. You could say there’s very few publishers, but that ignores there are uncountably many of us.
Is it tech that’s unexciting or just big tech that is that way?.. where is Larry Ellison anyway?
Cortana will be shouting at me by 2:30. All kinds of amazing things are here now, or on the horizon. But none of that has me doing extra searches, or reading anything beyond my normal sources of tech news.
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