It is the one of the fundamental properties of the universe that its entropy is increasing – in other words, it tends to become ever more disordered or chaotic. I sometimes wonder whether the same principle applies to computers, too.
Go back just over twenty years and we find computers like the Sinclair Spectrum and the BBC Micro – simple, chunky machines that plugged into a TV set. Load a program into them from a tape and off you go! Well, that was the theory at
least. In practice you’d probably sit there gnashing your teeth for half an hour or so while you made repeated attempts to load the $@&&**!! thing. But that aside, my point is that they were simple. It wasn’t rocket science to figure out how to use them or even how to program them.
Computer Development.
A little later came along a new generation of machines, of which the best, in my humble opinion, was the Commodore Amiga. This was a more sophisticated beast, capable of multitasking several programs at once, which opened in their own windows (no capital initial, note!) on the screen. It had a reliable floppy disc drive, later versions had hard drives – and it still plugged into your telly! No separate monitor required. It’s doubtful that too many Amiga users ever learned to program the thing in BASIC or whatever, but file management was a doddle.
Every file in the operating system had a clear purpose and a place where it was supposed to be. You wanted to install a new piece of software on it? Easy – just pop in the disc. If you had a hard drive, you could just copy the files to it. No mucking about with registries or installer programs. And get this – you could switch it off. You could switch it off! I mean, with an ‘off’ switch. Or just by pulling the plug. Unbelievable, isn’t it? No waiting for the operating system to shut down first. No having to go through Scandisk or Safe Mode when switching it on again after pulling the plug. And we took this for granted!