Dilbert - Smart Phone Rage

Nice to see some of your suspicions confirmed by others, isn't it? Especially if by Dilbert. I cell phone but I don't smart phone. Have never really seen the advantage to being immediately accessible to others at their convenience, nor the need to interface with something while out doing something else. In fact, as a young traveling resource many years ago, I had the early opportunity to observe that much of frantic demand for immediate attention came from others who neither needed such access nor warranted it. There are exceptions, of course...family and such.

I've sat at conference tables in recent years where something like shown below actually took place.

Adios

Online Data Insecurity

You’ve certainly noticed the non-stop news reports of security breaches occurring within so many of our top corporations and government entities, as have I. And perhaps you’re sharp enough to have developed some defenses for yourself; but, for a variety of reasons I would guess that you have not done so. Hopefully, due to your age and experience, you will at least be cognizant of the risks.

The latest report I’ve read presents some of the best reportage of the underlying problem I’ve seen. It begins, Until recently, medical files belonging to nearly 300,000 Californians sat unsecured on the Internet for the entire world to see.

If you’re at all concerned about the problem, I would highly recommend that you take a few moments to read the article; if not, ….. good luck!

The underlying problem, as I see it, is poor to bumbling management ... Dilbert’s Pointy Haired Boss is "running things." The people who should be looking after these things are largely over their heads, with respect to the technology and common sense.

Should the link be dropped, it points to an AP report authored by Jordan Robertson, entitled, “New data spill shows risk of online health records” dated 21 August 2011. A Google search should easily find it.

Adios

Smartphones

Ever since having to use a phone to call one of you EHHS girls for a date, my relationship with phones has been, at best, a mixed bag. I've never been one to curl up with a phone and talk mindlessly for hours.

Until I settled on a steady girl at EH, or rather she settled on me, I would pace, dry sweaty palms, and fight dry throat before calling my intended date. Then, within a few moments, everything was O.K. As is often said, "this, too, shall pass" and it did.

However, not much later, about the time I left the house to take on the world by myself, the telephone took on another status...an extreme irritant. Siding salesmen, newspaper subscriptions, and hundreds of other dopey propositions started coming in on my phone...and those were the days before you could switch off the ringer, dump to voice mail, or screen with caller ID. Working with a large corporation with far-flung divisions, wide-spread internal interests, and an array of customers introduced yet another level of telephone irritation. In pretty short order, I came to view the telephone more as nuisance than anything else and sought to live life as free from them as possible.

You may have noticed that I put a link to DILBERT along the upper, right side panel. Scott Adams, Dilbert's creator, has been amazingly locked in on modern-day corporate nuttiness since the mid-1990s, demonstrating daily that neither clarity nor truth need many words to convey their message. Recently, he did a couple of panels on the current telephone fad, "smart phones." I look to DILBERT ( & Adams) to render an accurate portrait of many things we see being breathlessly touted in TV ads these days. I think he may have done it yet again, this time on the underlying truth of smart phones.

Wireless internet access has always been a beguiling prospect unfortunately, plagued by a number of technical limitations. Maybe it still is.

Adios

1974 Texas Instruments SR-10

As I recall this SR-10 was the first affordable electronic calculator with some "advanced" functions. There was that HP model, but it was about 3-times more. This "advanced" model cost $150 in 1974 ($655 in 2010 dollars); the HP at $400 in 1974 was just too much ($1750 in 2010 dollars).

Well, it was a step up from those old coffee grinder adding machines we used to add up the expense accounts.

Adios

Memory Storage

Over the course of the past few years I’ve undertaken to scan all the old family pictures that go back about 4-5 generations, also all the certificates and hundreds of pages of written history about the ancient generations. Currently, there are something on the order of 7500 files occupying about 3GB of memory. Of course, I backup these files to 2 or 3 different drives, including a flash drive and will probably consider using an online file storage service before long.

As you probably know, memory has been growing exponentially over the past few years and the cost has been plummeting. Like I’m sure most of us have done, I’ve migrated data storage from 5” floppies to 3” floppies to compact disks to external hard drives, and now more and more to flash drives.

A few days ago while checking out of some store I spotted the little flash drive shown above, hanging near the register. It’s about the size of one of my ring finger joints and is rated at 4GB, enough to hold all my family files with 1GB to spare! I can put an entire Office suite of software in less than half the remaining space and take everything I need to operate independently from any computer someone would lend me for temporary use.

Cost - $10. Amazing stuff.

Adios

SPAM

I use several email addresses, each for different online communities, and very rarely post them anywhere online; the theory being, by protecting the addresses, I won’t be pestered by spam. However, I do order some things online which do require leaving an address.

Where possible, I use one of the disposable address services that allow me to retrieve mail and verify links. Where the disposable addresses are filtered, I use an address I consider a throw-away should the spam volume become intolerable. I’ve been doing this for about 15-years or so, and have never found the volume of spam to be much of an irritant, nor have I had to abandon an address due to spam overload.

All that said, I do get some spam in one of my more active Yahoo addresses. It seems that there are spammers who work something like the old robo-dialers on the telephone…they just go down the list and spam them all. Of course, Yahoo tends to set some filters and I set others, such that most of that stuff is automatically shunted off into a spam folder.

Now and then it’s interesting to take a look at some of the spam mail. It’s a wonder that anyone sending that kind of stuff out would expect to get responses, but maybe they do.

Mujahideen wants me to call him urgently; my old pal Ibrahim Bhaki writes me—Dear Friend; several folks, including Mr. Karim Ahmed, are wanting to send me money from various funds I don’t know about but they will help, I’m sure; julian justin yak’s subject is “Dearest one” – wonder what jjy wants; Microsoft Office is writing about something…sometimes it comes in as Microsofts Office…they’re in a hurry, I suppose. And so on, and so on.

I used to stand by the waste basket and throw away everything marked “bulk rate” without bothering to open it. Many days, that took care of 90% of a day’s mail in just a few seconds. Then the junk mailers got into cahoots with the post office and started marking junk mail “presorted first class” and printing my name and address all over everything inside. Then I had to start shredding.

Some of the Asian subcontinent societies may have it right…just take people that irritate you out behind the barn and flog them with a stick. For now, spam filters and that delete button works pretty well.

Adios

PCs & 63s - Part 8

About 1917, the local DAR erected these 3 markers in a small, very old country cemetery in southwestern Arkansas. One of them is my 3rd great grandfather. He and the other 2 gentlemen honored by the DAR were soldiers of the American Revolution. Years ago, dad purchased a couple of books and did some light research of that family line but had done little more than work out the vitals and draw a crude family tree. What he knew of our great grandfather’s service in the Revolution was limited to the markings on that old stone monument. When Dad died, the books and the project passed to me. It was about the beginning of popular use of the Internet…the late 1990s.

About the first substantial project I undertook online was to dig into my family history, starting with this line. Like most of us, I was a native Texan with early lineage going way back to southern places east of Texas. North Texas stock generally came from Tennessee, Kentucky, and the Carolinas. Migration of that stock occurred over a period of a century or so and several generations.

Advanced genealogists were among the first groups to make good use of the Internet for communications and exchange of information. Working within that group I learned how to protect my privacy, get information I needed, and give others what I could without opening up to some of the lousy parts of dealing with the web.

Finding my roots was a useful and sobering exercise that really illustrated the potential of the web. Beyond dad’s rudimentary work, most of the knowledge I have came from making contacts over the web. There is little that is more boring than someone else’s family history and I won’t bore you with mine. However, I think it useful to show some of the amazing discoveries by way illustrating what is possible with the web.

Grandpa Jim Williams died in 1851 at age 87. On his DAR marker are 2 other names and it was those names that first opened up Jim’s story to me. Jim, himself, was an illiterate farmer who made his mark, an “X”, on legal documents. However, one of those documents was an application for a Revolutionary War pension made in the County Clerk’s office in 1833. The clerk wrote Jim’s words down and in them was Jim’s own statement of service during the Revolution. His words were not flowery, just a simple statement of facts that included several more names of men with whom he served. One of them was a regular correspondent with Thomas Jefferson and another was the first governor of Tennessee.

At age 15, Grandpa Jim was a junior member of the Overmountain Men; frontiersmen, who played an active part in settling early America and were living in settlements in the vicinity of today’s NE point of TN and SW point of VA. Daniel Boone was one of these Overmountain Men. Family lore has long had it that his branch of the Williams family came from Wales to Charleston about 1740. Finding specific Williams ancestors is about as tough as finding Johnson and Smith ancestors…and most males were named John or James in those days.

That Williams line goes kind of murky before about 1770 such that it has been impossible to firmly tie individuals to one another for a couple of generations. However, another bit of information learned in the study is that there is one of the earliest southern maps in a Carolina university that shows names of early settlers on the plantations lining rivers and tributaries…there were so few people on the land in those early days that it was the custom to name the plantation owners on the map itself.

A section of it shows 4 plantation owners named Williams located in the far NE corner of North Carolina, just inside the Outer Banks. Although it is likely that these Williams’ are not direct ancestors, they are most likely the first contingent of Welch Williams’ to immigrate to the New World. Where just 10-years ago I had to send off for a large copy of the map, it is now posted online in HD. A fifth plantation owner shown in the map is Boone.

Other interesting projects have been to flesh out my father’s WWII service in the Air Force and my great grandfather’s service in the Confederate Army. Both studies have led to some amazing discoveries and some wonderful connections with fine, knowledgeable people.


Quite aside from the armies of newly minted future business tycoons spouting CRM, ERP, Six Sigma, or errant daughters exposing themselves with cheap cell phone cameras, and all that other crap, the Web holds fantastic possibilities for anyone to learn just about anything he or she wants to learn.


Adios

PCs & 63s - Part 7

I’ve struggled a bit with how to wind this little series up and get on to more interesting things.  However, it’s probably been worthwhile to create a reasonably brief summary record of computer technology’s march through some of our lives, at least from one ’63 Highlander’s point of view.  Many of us struggled with this stuff for decades before we started retiring.

With the introduction of additional complexities brought to us when Internet connections started replacing our old familiar phones and fax machines, it sometimes seemed that all the new stuff was just a new way to add layers of complexity to an already complex working environment without really solving any of the lingering problems.  Indeed, it seemed that despite copious lip service given to the benefits of the newer technologies, lots of things that were relatively simple were made more complex.

For about 30-40 years MIS initiatives have been trying to find ways to automate more and more of the business environments.  The simple reason MIS proponents keep finding support is their promise of eventual labor and cost savings.  Automation of simple financial functions has found reasonable success; however, more recent initiatives have been pointed at automating more complex portions of a business.  People in operations and marketing seem to be more difficult to fit into CRM, ERP, and other such MIS schemes.  While I’m no expert in the subject of automation, I’ve been fortunate to have spent most of my working life in smaller, entrepreneurial enterprises where individual capabilities are valued and indispensable. 

After selling our last enterprise to a much larger multi-national, during the earn-out period, we had the experience of observing a new management team institute a state of the art CRM software program.  They promptly took a profitable enterprise to zero EBIT and then to a series of solid losses.  Although not lacking in hubris and arrogance, it seemed perfectly clear that their CRM approach was not producing what they expected.  If you Google “CRM failures” you will find a number of articles on the topic; and if you Google “CRM successes” you find fewer positive stories in the list.

Suffice it to say that this part of the computer revolution is a work in progress.  If all this has left you wondering what I’m talking about…good for you…you must not have had to deal with it in your former professions.  If you recall the FBI story of scrapping a $150,000,000 data automation project a few years back; or the Denver airport baggage fiasco when that facility opened; or even further back, the People Mover at DFW that was pretty much an expensive failure; or any number of other failures of a similar nature, then you have some knowledge of the CRM activities I’m dealing with here.  Finding specific knowledge of large failures can be difficult because those responsible for those failures will generally be pretty good at covering things up. 

One writer succinctly said it:  computer programmers know nothing of business and businessmen know nothing of computer programming and they don’t talk to one another.  Of course it’s not that easy.  Business schools all over the nation are trying to rectify that now by sending out legions of newly minted MBAs to serve as “coaches” for the implementation of current versions of CRM programs.  It seems to me that the problem is still in the businessmen finding the time away from conducting business to play around with the programs.  For most people in their day-to-day work life I think it’s just a nuisance.  I’ve about blown myself out on this…it’s not a favorite topic, but it is one that has been sucking up billions of dollars for a couple of decades now and for the most part it seems that the leadership has been supplied by a legion of clones resembling Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss.

PCs & 63s - Part 6

There has been no shortage of amusement to be had with this PC stuff. Remember when you first saw those alarming messages, “fatal error, illegal operation, critical condition” flash onto your screen? Goodness gracious, I expected an imminent lighting strike or the cops charging in the door any moment.

Once businessmen broke the 40+ year grip engineers and programmers held over computer technology (since 1939 prox), the flood gates of innovation started opening as fast as technology advancements could be accomplished. Driven by demand identified by businessmen, the techs were funded and tasked to develop the necessary technologies to meet the demand. Engineers might find certain tasks scientifically impossible, but are very good at developing suitable alternatives.

When the Net started opening up to the masses about 1995, we the masses responded in many different ways. Our children quickly gravitated to “chat rooms” where they could readily meet perverts posing as peers. Parents had no clue...nor did teachers…nor did legislatures…nor did law enforcement. The only response we really had then was to keep ourselves informed, keep an eye on the kids and limit access to the net until we could figure out what was going on.

With the subsequent arrival of broadband about 2002-3, which enabled rapid transfer of images and videos, came more issues. Cell phone access to the net compounded those same issues even further. Now our pubescent offspring could recluse themselves and send out x-rated pictures to the world. Probably never before had competent parenting been more important or more lacking.

At work, adults had and still have similar problems with their junior employees. Not only is it a problem concerning competent business communications, it’s also a problem in the always vague arena of common sense, or lack thereof. As I was cautioned so many years ago about taking care with my written communication, or more importantly to think about what I was doing before doing it, those lessons seem to be in a serious decline in the Internet world.

Literally everything that is digitized and posted to the net is potentially forever in the public domain and subject to surfacing at any time in the future whether convenient or not…whether true or not.  And that picture your daughter or granddaughter took of her skivvies for some chuckles might rest in hard drives all over the world only to be brought forth later on when she might least wish it to resurface.  Good grief.

PCs & 63s - Part 5

Technology company senior management tended to be about 10-years younger than our generation and their engineering staffs were perhaps 10-20 years younger.  Initiatives and routines developed by those younger people reflected their own views and experiences which were often much different than ours.  In no small degree, our generation tended to be more like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss than the tech-savvy subordinate staff.  Our ages at the time of various significant technology milestones are marked on the Windows timeline above.  Note that Gates bailed out about the time we started winding things up ourselves, or about the time the Internet started gaining influence. 

I’ve read that the Internet and PC technologies were originally brought forth by hippies.  A quick glance at the fledgling Microsoft 1978 staff portrait seems to support that statement.  No wonder we have been struggling to understand all this stuff bubbling up behind us.

 

A number of large corporations by-passed our generation for senior management positions, instead, dropping down to those a decade or so younger for their next senior managers.  The thought was that those younger managers would be more tech savvy, which was correct, and would be available to run those corporations for 20-years, or more…which may prove to be incorrect.  Time will tell.

We are regularly seeing some of the results of immature business leadership in the Internet age.  Some examples are the release of large numbers of private credit data to the Net; the release of confidential government messages in large numbers; the failure of the entire air traffic control systems some days; the shutdown of entire airlines and airports on others; and the failure of large sections of the power grid.  These lapses are undoubtedly examples of senior management fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of the technology they’ve been entrusting to junior employees.  This, I believe, is a manifestation of Gates’ “tidal wave.”

As a young employee of a large corporation many years ago, I was cautioned to never write anything that I would not want to see again or be prepared to defend.  An old Boston politician addressed the notion a century earlier when he said, “Never write when you can speak, never speak when you can nod, never nod when you can wink.”  And one of the late New York governors amplified the sentiment when he added, “and never put it in an e-mail.” 

It seems that companies and governments led by immature management have forgotten that old saw and/or neglected to teach it to their junior charges.

The arrival of the Internet to our PC world suddenly introduced almost unlimited communications capabilities to our desk top.  No longer were we dealing only with how programs worked, we were dealing with how to effectively communicate with others while maintaining our privacy, professionalism, and confidentialities.  Suddenly, most of our communications were written and thus subject to the Boston politician’s caution. 

Not everyone in a “brick & mortar” business organization were authorized to create written business communications with others.  The simple truth is, not everyone is a competent writer.  Good writers are not always good thinkers and I’ve seen many examples of very smart people who were terrible writers.  Combining and controlling those talents and skills was once one of the principal responsibilities of an organization’s managers.  If my own observations in the advancing Internet “tidal wave” are common, then I would think that competent communications within large companies are suffering.

PCs & 63s - Part 4

You probably recall the 1980s & 1990s stories of young “teams” of programmers working days at a time 24/7, eating pizza, and riding skateboards in the hallways of the fledgling software companies.  Then there were the lavish product announcement parties and the dot-com bubble of the 1998-2000 (prox).  This spending was done on the seed money lavishly provided by venture capitalists hoping to gain ownership of the next big hi-tech payoff.  The gamble for those youngsters, who were working for low pay and stock options, was that their dot-com business would go public in an IPO and their share options would make them suddenly rich.  For some, it worked out that way, for many others it did not, as the bubble burst during spring 2000.

For those of us working in the suddenly old-fashioned “brick and mortar” businesses and institutions, the struggle to make sense of all the computer noise was a prodigious one.  We had the existing businesses to run and didn’t have much free time to take on gobs of new technology initiatives that were being thrust on us by eager corporate and academic managements.  To us, those utterly computer illiterate, elder managers were looking more and more like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss…a guy who wanted to be a part of the new technology world, but hadn’t a clue how to do it himself.    

Signaling that change was in the air, Bill Gates wrote his infamous 1995 “Tidal Wave” memo to his Microsoft executive staff stating the Internet would bring a “Tidal Wave” of change for the company.  He was right about that and within a few years stepped away from the day-to-day management of Microsoft.  What wasn’t entirely clear at the time was that Gates’ style of dominating the PC business was being swamped by that “tidal wave” developing on the Internet. 

At least since the 1980s, large manufacturing companies had been working to trim their payrolls and other overheads by setting up “Supply Chain Management” systems.  I think they got their notions from having their clocks cleaned by the Japanese manufacturers in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  Studies determined that the Japanese were doing a couple of things differently than the USA.  One, they had established close working relationships with their suppliers to provide just-in-time delivery of parts and supplies to the manufacturing lines, the theory being, that the mfg. would not have to carry taxable parts inventories; and second, they had applied their employees as cooperative “teams” intended to cut away separate division impediments to problem solving and sweep aside levels of managers protecting their turf. 

When the Internet came widely available, proponents of the “team” and “process” approaches got their chance to advance their ideas to the net.  The trouble was that those same companies were dependent on old farts like us to ensure that things would continue to run smoothly using the older methods.  We were about 55 in 2000 when this stuff began to gain steam.  More in Part 5.

PCs & 63s - Part 3

I've long thought that the computer business was an immature enterprise, not only in its chronological age, but also in the personification of its principal proponents and the constant chaotic nature of it. Perhaps other fledgling industries started out the same way...with a great, if incomplete, idea, promoted by ruthless, possibly deceptive young people, chaotic, exciting, and ultimately life changing. Not since the Industrial Revolution moved us from an agrarian society to an industrial one, have we experienced the potential for such enormous change to our way of life.

The troubling thing for me has been the realization that the impetus for all this change has been has been pushed hard by the young behind us. That’s probably not unusual within the sweep of history, but it’s troubling nonetheless that we apparently have been neither competent nor aggressive leaders in the revolution, and we should have been. Since about 1995-96 the comic strip, Dilbert, has been chronicling the oppressive ineptitude of the clueless pointy-haired boss and his hapless employees. Whether we are the pointy-haired bosses or those just older than us are, would be a matter of what your particular experience has been.

I noticed the rumble of things to come on the horizon about the same time Scott Young started his Dilbert strip in 1995-96, just as the Internet was becoming widely accessible. It came as the muted noise surrounding Supply Chain Management initiatives and later by ERP, CRM, Six Sigma, and a plethora of other acronyms used to describe, in fuzzy terms, the application of computer control systems to every facet of business processes; those work elements that are relatively common to all businesses—invoicing, receivables, payables, costing, inventories, schedules, business communications, payrolls, insurance, taxes, reporting, follow-up, etc.

In those early days, the SCM ambition was huge, but the capability was miniscule and somewhat laughable, causing the initiative to be slow in gaining footholds in the large companies that were our customers. Existing employee resistance to change was as significant as was the absence of competent technologies, despite the promises screaming from the technology proponents. Older people like us tended to view the technology as a tool, while the younger, true believers, had come to view the new technologies as irreplaceable processes, without which nothing could succeed and everything would fail.  In some recent experiences it seems that massive failures have been accelerated by the slavish dependence on the technologies themselves. 

More to come...Part 4

PCs & 63s - Part 2

There is plenty of detailed history of this subject on many sites around the net so all I will try to do is summarize what happened while we were busy raising our families and working. If you were like me during the 1980s, life was a combination of survival mode and running fledgling businesses…there was no time to spend trying to understand all the noise going on in the computer world.

In my mind, it was these two guys, Jobs and Gates, that came to summarize personal computing in our lives, at least since 1980 or thereabouts. In simple terms, it was their drive and their companies that finally won the operating system wars which would pave the way to standardization of software, a struggle much like the video format wars fought a few years earlier to settle whether we would use VHS vs. Beta format. I had a Tandy computer by 1981, but for 2-years or so had little clue what to do with it. About all I recall about computing in the 1980s was that you could write letters and reports with a word processing program; you could fill a spreadsheet with formulas and do a lot of calculating; and you could waste a ton of time playing some rudimentary games, like Pong or Space Invaders.

By 1986, I had a Tandy laptop that had 48K (yes, K) of memory and a small floppy drive. The 48K internal memory on this Tandy could hold about 4 letters, then you had to dump off to the floppy everything over that.  It was running subsets of MS software, which at least provided an introduction of what was to come.  Large companies were paying tons of money for higher power systems but that was out of reach for those of us on smaller budgets.  What, if anything substantial, those larger companies were accomplishing with that high power equipment I couldn't say with any authority.  The lagging piece of the technology puzzle was always we the people not knowing how to make good use of all that stuff.  There were "training" courses, but those that I saw were pretty weak with respect to applying the knowledge.

By 1989, we were using some larger Tandy machines, but still mostly as typewriter replacements.  There was no linkage between them until sometime in the early 1990s when we added a LAN server.  That sure saved a lot of time by not having to save documents to floppies and walking them from one computer to another, or shipping a disk out via FedEx.

After a decade of fussing with incompatible software and no electronic linkage, early versions of Microsoft Office came available about the same time we were able to put in a LAN.  Soon all the internal squabbles regarding what software to standardize with, went away.  Windows 95 ushered in the Internet age and email for us and Windows XP expanded image handling capability along with the arrival of broadband ISP connections which enabled moving a lot more information around by 2003.  Of course upgrading all of our ISP connections was time consuming and expensive.

For us, all this development came in fits and starts, as not only were the computer industry players jockeying with one another for competitive advantage, our company head was a computer illiterate dinosaur who never got beyond thinking of the PCs as typewriter replacements.  To him, Internet, email, and other such technologies seemed to be unobtrusive ways for employees to waste time, so he was difficult to prod along toward advancing our communication capabilities beyond fax and phone.  Most of us simply bought our own computers for the home and kept up with the racing advancements from 1995 onward.

It's been easy to see so many small businesses and professional practices struggle with incorporating the new communications technologies.  Many of those principals are our age and most of them would rather not be bothered with this tedious stuff.  Unfortunately dealing with other companies and agencies has rapidly resulted in the need to update everyones' communication capabilities.  And Mr. Jobs and Mr. Gates started it all for us.

 

PCs & 63s - Part 1

My first brush with a computer came in 1963 when the college engineering school thought it would be a good idea to give their incoming class a brief introductory course. It was more of a one-week seminar during which several hundred students were to write a small program to solve a trig problem, go to the lab, punch the IBM cards (yes, IBM cards), hand the pack to a computer dude behind a gated enclosure who then inserted your stack of cards for reading and performing the instructions.

There were 4 card punchers and 1 computer…for several hundred students. The lectures were unintelligible and the experience was a nightmare. I didn’t care if I ever saw another computer…let the dorks who liked that kind of stuff deal with it. There was one more experience a few years later that was about the same. Again I said to heck with that computer stuff. Sane people simply didn’t waste their lives with that kind of frustration. As it turned out later only dorks like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs put up with that kind of frustration.

Watch about 5-10 minutes of this video to see what put me to sleep

Our age group is about the eldest that took some time to become familiar with 1980s desktop computing—there are some exceptions, of course. Some of us stayed clear of it while some older folks took to it with gusto. We were about 35 when the PCs started showing up in the workplace and most of us were far enough along in our careers that we could avoid dealing with the stuff if we wished.

During my working years I noticed another discriminator between computer literate people and those who were not. That was whether they had touch typing skills or not. If they did not, then interacting with a PC was much more difficult. I’ve seen remarkably fine professionals who were really handicapped in doing much with a computer by their inability to type rapidly. Some of them are still writing their things out in long-hand for a secretary to type for them.

In the early 1970s I saw the first remote terminal installed in a large company engineering office. There were 30-40 engineers in the office and one computer terminal that none of them knew how to operate. One guy, the weakest of them, was assigned to learn how to use it and he spent weeks and months in front of that screen. He got very good at playing games on that old computer. In manufacturing plants large mainframe computers were used to log and report process data points. PCs came along about 6-7 years later and everything started to change.

For most of the 1980s we used computers as expensive typewriter replacements that had some additional capability to store documents. A few made some rudimentary use of the spreadsheet programs; there was no Internet then, nor it seemed, did any of the programs people chose to use have the ability to be read and acted on by other programs…nothing was compatible with much of anything else. Industrial plants started using PC based controllers to replace the old analog devices. Operators seemed overwhelmed by excessive data reporting…it was hard to tell for sure because no one wanted to be seen as lagging behind the technology.

The 1990s brought software standardization with Microsoft’s Office, Local Area Networks, and the Internet for the masses about 1995, only 15-years ago. Software began to expand and improve permitting computers to be used for more than typewriter replacements and simple spreadsheets.

In my opinion the most significant milestones in the useful application of PCs was the 1990 Windows 3.0, their first GUI program, followed by Windows 95 in 1995 which opened up the Internet along with more user friendly software. In 2003, broadband was replacing phone lines as ISPs and data transfer sped up by orders of magnitude. Windows XP was introduced that same year and was, in my opinion, the first real improvement since Windows 95.

Development of the PC operating environment has been a constant balance of processor speed with memory capacity, operating system improvement, band-width growth, and the availability of competent software programs. Thrown in the mix has always been the noise from wireless vendors which have, to my mind, added quite a bit of confusion to understanding the PC environment. It’s simply a phone company vs. cable company battle for providing ISP services. I think the confusion added by this and many other noise makers has significantly hampered moving the entire science forward. More in the next posting.

Adios

Technology & Computers

My first computer dated to about 1981 or 1982. It was a 48K, 2 disc drive affair that cost me $2500 including an upgrade to include two, 5” floppy drives. The people that recommended the extra disc drives could never quite explain to me in clear terms why I needed them or what they would do. Sound familiar? That thing came with “documentation” which bore a faint resemblance to operating instructions, but was housed in loose-leaf form in a 3-ring binder! It was incomprehensible. I put that thing aside after plugging away at it for several days. I was about 37 and was busy making a living. No time for that foolishness.

There was no Internet then and the computer memory was so small that each time you wanted to run a program you had to load it from a tape cassette—imagine that! There might have been some rudimentary email capability, but only if you could figure out how to tie it to the phone line. Of course, you also needed to have someone available elsewhere who was prepared to receive your message. After about 2-years, the “documentation” had advanced somewhat to provide a set of 6 audio cassette tapes that were decent enough to walk you through an tutorial on the word processor. 

By 1985 or 1986 I could write a letter with the $2500 gizmo. A series of increasingly less dismal computers came along in a 3-4 year sequence for many years after that.

The reason I mention this is introduce the notion that we, as 60-year olds, might have been born a bit too early to take full advantage of all this whiz-bang technology. I have noticed for some years that people older than us are mostly computer illiterate; those in our age range are probably the eldest of the computer literate population and a good percentage of us are not very good at it—maybe even a bit intimidated by it. We should be. This stuff can be scary and technically savvy bad people (always younger ones) can do quite a bit of damage if you are not wary. Even if they don’t damage you, they can frustrate the dickens out of you with their endless gibberish. How about those tedious telephone menus we have had to deal with for about 20-years now?

It strikes me that this technology has arrived during our lives in 2 distinct waves. First, the arrival of the computers themselves about 1980 and now, the intermingling of technologies on the web, on our cell phones, at our banks, and a lot of other places. 

This latest wave of new technology seems to have really gotten its start about the time of Windows 95 in 1995, and became supercharged about the time Windows XP was introduced in late 2001. By then we were senior managers, officers, partners, deans, or whatever else we were/are, and once again, our responsibilities were such that we really didn’t have the time to devote to learning all this stuff. Or maybe we just didn’t find the motivation. We simply turned it over to the kids and told them what we wanted. Sometimes we got it, often we didn’t. And let me submit that learning this stuff takes a lot of time and dedication.

However, fear not. I am certain that as they join, some of our Clan will show you some of the tricks of the web.

Adios.