02/01/07

Some closing thoughts:

Well, the two weeks have passed and it's been a good warm-up. I relived some old Mac memories, did a little programming, and have a new toy with my PowerBook 170. It was nice to be back in the old days of System 6, and I'll likely continue to play around with the IIsi. Hopefully I'll get the IIcx back on its feet sometime soon.

It's interesting to me that beyond the internet, we haven't really seen the huge revolution in capability from computers that you'd expect given the horsepower we have today. Today's machine is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the IIsi I used for the challenge, and beyond things being prettier, and increases in capacity allowing storage of more images, sound, and so on - the overall computing experience hasn't changed much. The operating system today is more capable, but incrementally so. Productivity applications are essentially the same. It's disappointing really, that all we've seemed to accomplish with our billions of additional processor cycles is to pretty up the UI and squeeze more polygons into our games.

Yeah, we have the web today, and my poor IIsi doesn't quite have the oomph to browse effectively. But that's not the IIsi's fault - when I need the web, and I mean *need* the web, I'm using it to send and receive information. Read the news, check my bank balance, communicate via message boards and so on. All of this is merely the sending and receiving of textual data - nothing that the IIsi cannot handle. Of course the web as we know it is full of many kinds of media, not just text, but the sound and video components are in most cases secondary to what makes the web, and the internet in general, so revolutionary.

I'm not suggesting that we all go back to 68030 based machines, but imagine if we could go back in time to 1989 and talk to someone that just spent $5,000 on a 5/80 IIcx. We'd say that today with that five grand he could buy *two* systems each with a thousand times the processing power, a thousand times the memory, and several thousand times the hard drive space. He'd be impressed, of course, but I'd bet that if you sat him in front of such a machine he'd be horribly disappointed. Sure sound and video is more prevalent. There's certainly a lot more eye candy. But perhaps the mere fact that he'd be able to use the new computer without much difficulty indicates that we've only made incremental improvements. Certainly not the kinds of revolutionary changes someone from 1989 would expect from a computer of today's capability.

Or maybe what we have today is good enough, and there hasn't been change because change wasn't necessary. Whatever the reason, spending a couple of weeks with the IIsi has left me with the simple statement, "Using this machine for two weeks should have been much, much more difficult."