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 ast Thursday, October
25th, was the release date for Microsoft's new version of the Windows
operating system, called "Windows XP"....
Lost your attention?
I should certainly hope so. Nothing is more boring than computers.
I know whereof I speak: Until recently, for most of my adult life
I made a living by programming the damn things, or by directing
the efforts of others who did so. Permit me, please, to take a saunter
down memory lane before I get into the philippics.
I started out
with a fine enthusiasm, programming big old third-generation mainframes.
Those suckers were awesome. (Yes, this is still Derb here.
I am lapsing into geek-speak only to try to catch some of the flavor
of my early career in IT. Bear with me, please.) Back around 1980
a mainframe computer filled a whole floor. The air-conditioning
unit alone cost as much as a car. When you'd learned to make a mainframe
sit up and beg, the feeling of power was truly bodacious. At one
place I worked, they ran the mainframe only in daytime hours. I
asked, and got, permission to do my program testing overnight. I
would go home, have dinner, come back, let myself into the computer
room, power up the a/c, power up the mainframe, IPL and run the
boot deck (those who understand, will understand), allocate myself
a couple of partitions, and — vroooom! It was like being alone
at the controls of the space shuttle. I tell you, I could make that
thing sing and dance. I created reports, I designed screens, I built
vast databases. In between times, I had fun: One night, for a bet,
I wrote a COBOL program to compute pi to 100,000 decimal places.
Just as the
thrill was beginning to wear off, along came PCs. Of course, having
coded for the Big Iron from its very console, you first had to shake
off the feeling that PCs were just kids' toys. Once you had broken
through that psychological barrier, though, this was a whole new
world. You bought the thing in a box and took it home! Then you
bought a copy of MASM* and you were off and running. For girly types
who couldn't handle MASM there was Turbo C with its clunky WordStar-style
IDE and that subtle, intriguing collection of bugs you had to code
around. (Everybody knew that if you had a far pointer to
an array of structures, the first element in the array got populated
with gibberish and was unusable.) I was always a MASM hacker myself,
though — I even had a dis-assembler for hacking into
other people's object code. SCASB! STOSB! LODSB! XOR! PUSH and POP!
NOP — an instruction that tells the processor to do nothing
at all! ASSUME — the mastery of which could make your
code completely incomprehensible!! DOS calls! Bit planes!
Those were the days when PC Magazine used to publish Assembler
listings right there in its pages. Neat software was sprouting up
all over the place. Remember Sidekick? Fastback? Xtree? dBase? Bliss
was it in that dawn to be alive; to be young was very heaven.
Then the suits
took over and it all got boring. Hey, look, I am a big fan of capitalism,
and I know these things have to happen. Our civilization rides on
the back of the suits — I know, I know. Some of my best friends
are suits. Hell, I was a suit myself, though not a very successful
or productive one. That was in the mid-1990s when there was, as
it happened, another efflorescence of creative computing, driven
by the Internet take-off, and the suits had to stand back for a
while and let the propeller-heads take the controls. It was all
too late for me. I'd started a family and acquired one of those
yellow paisley-pattern ties. Being a suit's not a bad life, and
having kids makes up for everything. Then I got interested in other
things and the wife got herself a job, so I quit the IT game altogether.
Now I am merely
a computer user. Not — here's the main point at last —
a very happy one. To be blunt about it, I hate the damn things.
Part of this is hacker esthetic snobbery: When you have written
a word processor yourself in less than 4,000 bytes, it is just offensive
to see that the latest version of MS Word occupies nearly nine million
bytes. What on earth is all that code doing? The art of coding
efficiently is dead. When disk space costs nothing, and memory very
nearly nothing, there is no point in being efficient, except of
course the esthetic point.
Most of it,
however, is just resentment at the hundreds of hours I have had
to spend just getting today's computers to work. Not "to work
the way I want them" — I have long since given up on that.
Just to work. When I had my first PC, back in that golden
age of the early 1980s, I tried everything and bought every piece
of software that came out. Now, I never try anything. Who dares?
I am hunkered down behind the dozen or so pieces of software that
are indispensable to my life and living, and wary of all newcomers.
Early this year I bought a
new desktop, and after weeks of fiddling got most of it working.
Now that's it, and I shall change nothing, nothing,
until I absolutely have to — until, that is, the next hard
drive failure. For the record, here are my indispensables, roughly
in order of usage:
· An
operating system, of course: this one is Windows ME.
· Norton Anti-Virus.
· IE for the Internet.
· Outlook, for e-mail.
· Word, for words.
· Excel, for any kind of lists, logs, records, and tables.
· Front Page for my website.
· Merriam-Webster's dictionary.
· Cool Edit for audio.
· Paint Shop Pro for graphics.
· Macro Express for scripting.
· Mathematica for math.
· NJ Star for Chinese.
· KEDIT for text files.
· Acrobat for PDF.
In case I ever
feel the urge to do some heavyweight programming, I have VB6 and
Access installed ... but the urge hasn't come upon me since I got
the new system. I believe — not without some nostalgia, and
perhaps even a dash of melancholy — that my programming days
are over.
So, shall I
be buying the XP upgrade? Not bloody likely. Why make trouble for
myself? Half my system wouldn't work, and the other half wouldn't
work the way I'm used to it working. Going from 98 to ME back in
February was enough of a headache.
Actually, it
was mainly a hardware headache. When I tried to run the install
for my trusty old Hewlett Packard 4100C scanner, it crashed ME so
comprehensively I had to restore to factory defaults. I called HP.
Oh, yeah, they said, there's a patch. Downloaded the patch, tried
to install again: same crash. Called HP again: "Oh yeah, there's
a disk you need." Bought the goddam disk. Ran it: Same crash.
Called HP. They had me check the part number printed on the disk
label. "Yep, that's the part number for the ME installer, can't
understand why it doesn't work for you..." Meanwhile, I had
been scrutinizing the disk. Burned into the inner ring around the
center hole was a part number different from the one printed
on the label. It was, in fact, the part number of the old install
software. HP had just stuck a new label, with a new part number
printed on it, on to the old ME-crashing install disk! I called
them up and explained this. The seventh or eighth techie understood
my point. I asked for a replacement. Got it: Same problem. Another:
The same. Called them. I was shunted off to the Distribution Center,
which sounded as if it was in somewhere like Bangladesh. After another
seven or eight attempts, I got the problem explained. They would
"research" it. Seven months later, HP is still "researching"
how to get a label saying "part number X" on to a disk
that actually contains part number X.
Furious with
HP, I went out and bought another scanner, an Epson 1240U. No way
I was ever going to buy HP again! Well, the Epson installed OK,
but it was all downhill from there. It would copy only in black
and white, and only at a uselessly low resolution. There was no
light-dark control. When I could get it to scan without crashing,
and had mastered the weirdly counterintuitive interface, I could
get a scan into Paint Shop Pro, but I really need a machine that
will copy without me having to scan first. I fired off some e-mails
and called them up. Once I had got past their stunned amazement
that I was trying to use an Epson scanner to copy to a non-Epson
printer — who ever heard of a user wanting to do that?!
— the techies were polite, keen, and ready to help, but a great
weariness had settled on me. "Let's try a few things, shall
we? First, reboot your machine..." Goodbye, afternoon. Why
do I have to beta-test their frigging drivers for them? Shouldn't
the damn thing work out of the box? Who's got the time for this
stuff?
I was starting
to hate the Epson machine on other grounds, too. It was designed,
I had come to realize, by the team in the Dilbert strip, under the
supervision of that pointy-haired boss. Get this: There is no on-off
switch! To preserve the life of your scanner lamp, you have to unplug
the machine from the wall receptacle each time you use it. It
actually tells you to do this in the instruction manual! I
cut through the power cable with scissors and wired up an inline
switch I bought from Home Depot for $2.89. Now the fool thing sits
there, sneering at me, and if I want to copy a health-insurance
form I have to scan it into Paint Shop Pro first, via a couple of
crash-reboot cycles. I weep for my dear old HP 4100C, which would
have copied to my dishwasher if I had asked it to, but which now
sits folornly on a basement shelf, useless under Windows ME because
the Ph.D.s at Hewlett Packard can't stick the right [expletive]
label on the right [expletive] [expletive] disk.
As you can
see, I get mad just thinking about the hundreds of hours of my one
and only life I have spent with these dolts and their chimp-designed
machines and their crappy software and their "distribution
centers" in Ulan Bator. No more: Qhat I have now works, more
or less, after a fashion, and I'm sticking with it till I have absolutely
no choice but to upgrade. XP? Only if Bill Gates himself comes
and installs it.
* That is,
Microsoft Assembler language, the lowest-level programming language
for the Intel family of chips, in which you write instructions from
the chip's own actual instruction set — "coding down to
the metal," we called it. I still have my first copy of MASM,
version 1.25.
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