Hanbing’s post about storage is a typical thoughts we have when we think about the progress of personal computing. But what exactly is the progress of personal computing for most people anyway. You have to think about what we do with the PC. Yes, it is true that processor speed, storage capacity, in fact, every marketable metrics have improved dramatically in the last ten years. However, we still use PC for editing a document, working on a spreadsheet, writing software programs exactly the same way as before. Using human metrics, there’s hardly any improvements in those most important tasks.
- Opening a word (back then its Word Perfect or Word Star) document is slower than 10 years ago, thanks to the “bloatware” and constant virus scanning; Same is spreadsheet.
- Software become more sophisticated, but also means you can’t fit your entire compiler and development environment (Turbo C) on one floppy disk. Unfortunately, that also means slower speed.
- Email – another killer app. We spend 2 hours of our life everyday to manage our emails. 10 years ago, it is 9600 Baud-rate but you hardly spend 30 minutes to process all of them. No spams, no giant attachments. Only the important stuff.
Well, you say there’re the wonders of internet and multimedia. So what, you can talk to a machine to buy stuff instead of a human being. And you can watch TV on your computer? Well, I would say the only thing we have today that the author of 2001: A Space Odessey hasn’t dreamed about, is MP3 and iPod. We have never thought about our whole music collection can be compressed so much and stored on a deck of cards. But that, has a lot more to do with signal processing (a derivative of engineering math) than personal computing.
Progress as I see it:
1. The web becomes a big knowledge base and accessible anywhere. With help of “search engines” like Google, one can find answers to most questions that interests himself. This feels good. To me, it is a kind of empowerment.
2. The “gap” between the underlying complexity of world entities (physical) and the software that interacts with physical world is being closed. So the apparent complexity of software system may still be a painful step towards a better future.
With machine virtualization technology, the software may eventually become “invisible”. Things being down without people thinking how they are done and where the pocessing power comes from.
Current stage of development may be just the chaotic period before such things. Word may not have improved on the surface, however, being written in .Net (?) and using a universal XML format, these definitely will help in realizing a ubiquitous computing future.
[...] ly is not those numbers. End user experience is more important, as evident in the “complains” from a personal friend: Openning a word/spread sheet [...]