Surplus Computing Power

In a now-fateful and historical presentation in about 1980 Steve Jobs spoke quite brilliantly about computing's past and its future. He was presenting at the cusp of a personal computer revolution. In just a few years his Macintosh would transform our understanding of computing and present a challenge to the ascendancy of IBM as that company synonymous with computers.

One component of his speech stuck out and I'll paraphrase that here. He stated that advances in memory storage and computer power were enabling computers to do more than just function as computers. He spoke in vague terms how the excess power and capabilities that this power offered would transform how we relate to computers. Computing power was being applied to the computation of a user interface. He had seen it at Xerox Parc and he was putting this into his vision for personal computing, the graphical user interface.

Yes, this would transform the computer. Sadly it didn't become a nigh-ubiquitous phenomenon until Bill Gates implemented the same thing into the native operating system on all the IBM-clones being shipped worldwide in the mid-1990s. But the vision was there. In fact, mining Jobs' old speeches is like cherry-picking, with the wisdom of hindsight just how much Jobs had gotten right because of his influence on the development trajectory of computers toward clunky text-based interfaces and arcane computer language interactions with file systems to the all visual, mouse-enabled environment that we appreciate today. And all of this was riding on the back of the excess computing power that was now housed within consumer-grade computers.

Now I only speak of this because a curious relationship occurred, which only drove the computer power curve toward exponentially more and more powerful processors and greater banks of memory. And that is the software and its increasingly complex and powerful demands that it placed upon the computer's processor and memory capacity. I write this at the end of 2014, hardly a remarkable moment in the history of the personal computer. Namely, this is because people are beginning to abandon the desktop computing environment for the mobile and gestural world of smartphones and tablets, what some aptly call 'internet appliances.' And they are named rightly so because they follow more egregiously the market model for computing devices. The future promises more powerful devices and, by-god, the software and, now, the net creates increasingly sophisticated environments to demand greater and greater amounts of power from those devices in order to push that future as an inevitability. And so be it, if I choose to run Windows 98 on a pre-Pentium computer, well, I can kiss internet access goodbye unless I'm reading monochrome listserv information belching vertically across my screen as if it were the pre-internet days of dial-up BBS-ing.

And here I stand, goaded by increasingly complex graphics, and a more information intensive web for which I need an increasingly complex computer to view. And I say this because the most egregious example of this in my life came from my Yahoo mail, which has tastefully rendered snowfall trickling across my mail to indicate that, yes, it's the holiday, and yes, those two have been welded together by a deep cultural association. But I don't need snowfall to remind myself that it's Christmas. Yahoo could have just as easily employed the skills of a designer to come up with a compatible color scheme for the holidays. But no, no, Yahoo had to render snowfall across my e-mail to tax the computing power of my computer.

Smooth functionality is such an important aspect of the computer user's experience. Wait times, load times, choppy scrolling, and jumpy cursors are the stuff of a computer user's frustration. And a world wide web of content produced under the auspices of media company's carefully contained  "ranch land" conspires to force my old mule into retirement by being too far behind Gordon Moore's technological curve.