For those of you folks hip on old computing systems, you might recognize this as the Xerox Alto. Xerox spent a few years putting this machine and its GUI together. The Alto was released back in the late 70's, and is rumored to have served (at least in part) as a motivation for Apple's familiar Macintosh series. This beast worked on a processor that spun at a whopping 5.8Mhz, had 128kb of RAM, and a luxurious 2.5MB hard drive.
For your consideration:
This is a pretty average machine you can buy today. Nothing amazing, I just gleaned an image from some retailer's site as an example. This Acer, to compare to the Alto of yester-paragraph, boasts a 2.5Ghz Dual Core processor, 4GB of RAM, and a sizeable 350GB hard drive.
This represents the advancement of computing over a 30-year period. In every area, the new has improvements in the neighborhood of orders of magnitude. With one --rarely considered-- exceptions: the human interface.
Don't misunderstand, I'm not suggesting that you wouldn't tell the difference if I switched out your mouse, keyboard, or monitor with the relics you see on the Alto. But the vast difference in the innards of the computer of then and now almost begs the question: "Why are we still doing things the same way?"
Well, we aren't... not quite. We've added speakers for audible feedback, and the Internet thing we've got going on is pretty cool from what I've heard. Yet, when we are hard-pressed to wrap our minds around just how far we've come in raw computing power, the way we incorporate this technology in our lives has only progressed linearly.
It's only been recently that we've seen our computers penetrate our day-to-day. New ideas like Skype, Social networks, iPhones, and full multimedia services are simply the beginning of a new revolution in computing. The tide has already begun to turn. The next stretch in the evolution of digital technology is in the way we use our computers. I wager we will be seeing new methods of interacting with these machines... maybe even the demise of the mouse and keyboard.
But that's hasty. There are good reasons these devices are still used. Each has its own function that it handles well (at least to some extent). But those are expositions for another time, and expositions less rife with opinion and prophecy, to be sure.
Sidiasus, still mashing keys, out.
