The demise of the personal computer

Quite recently, I decided that my 486/66 VESA Local Bus system just wasn't cutting the mustard. In my mind I justified the expense of an upgrade with all sorts of techno-dweeb reasons -- my ISA SCSI card was too slow for disk-intensive Windows 95, local bus video was getting sluggish, Pentium pipeline caching benefits, blah blah blah -- but between you and me, I was sick of wallowing through Duke Nukem 3D like a sloth on downers. Getting shot by pig-cops prancing around me like Porky Baryshnikov on bad angel dust was not my idea of a fun evening. The entire game began to eerily resemble an ungodly VGA montage of The Terminator and The Nutcracker Suite.

Time to buy baby new shoes ...

I knew what I wanted. I was gonna save a small bundle by cannibalizing my old case, monitor, power supply, keyboard, and mouse. I'd just strip out the guts and recycle the rest of the equipment. What little I saved in cash was lost tenfold in sanity ...

Here's what I told the salesguy behind the counter: "Pentium. Motherboard. RAM." Easy, huh? Until he wanted details ...

[Beep]. Start again.

[Beep]. More information required.

[Beep]. "Intel Inside", of course.

[Beep]. Pipeline or asynchronous cache?

[Beep]. Pipeline costs more.

[Beep]. Which BIOS?

[Beep]. Award and AMI are both good.

[Beep]. EDO RAM?

[Beep]. Michael Jackson? Don't get smart.

[Beep]. Specify VGA chipset.

[Beep]. Might I recommend a Number Nine? Our distributor is spiffing us ten dollars for each one we sell.

[Beep]. One megabyte or two?

[Beep]. VRAM, DRAM, or WRAM?

Two more minutes of this idle chit-chat and I would have reached across the counter, threaded his seventy-five dollar silk Honeymooners tie up his mouth and out his nose, and left singing the alphabet in random order.

Fortunately, we came to an agreement. He rung that sucker up and I left a Happy Guy. Got it home, tore apart my old machine, started installing my new system, and realized Mr. Anal-Checklist forgot to sell me a damn heatsink and CPU fan. I'm sitting in my room, a thousand dollars worth of screaming equipment in place ready to go, and if I power it up I don't dare let it run more than fifteen minutes before killing the electricity and immersing the entire system in liquid nitrogen.

I flew through intersections at a speed sufficient to achieve altitude if my truck had ailerons and made a beeline for the nearest electronic store to complete the system.

So much for the "personal computer". The whole experience was about as personal as Marine boot camp, and about as nerve-wracking. Somehow, the simple little systems created and sold years ago have evolved into this convoluted smorgasbord of customized hardware and ICs, a Frankenstein of computing machinery.

Is the WebBoy just Pong with TCP/IP?

I have to admit, conspiracy theories kept bouncing around in my head. Thoughts of "planned obsolescence" and "collusion" kept sufacing while bartering with the salesman. VRAM? WRAM? It seems that the hardware industry has locked onto the "Better Living Through Unneccessary Upgrades" strategy that has propelled software companies for years. And since when have groundbreaking discoveries require a trademark symbol next to their name? I mean, what if we all breathed "OxyGen©" or had CD players with a genuine "Laser© Inside" logo?

PCI? Plug-and-Play? The marcom guys have been slavering over this fresh technology, just champing at the bit to get out there and convince the world that all that hardware they bought last year is slow and pathetic.

This is what the PC market has grown into: huckters and confidence men trying their best to be heard above the thunderous din of the marketplace. Trying anything they can to distance themselves from the competition without deviating from specified standards and accepted norms. Innovation and progress are ball-and-chained by sales cycles and marketing blitzes.

With these sorts of going-ons, can the "personal computer" really be created? Or are we stuck with this unholy concoction for time eternal?

Some people would point to the Macintosh as the answer. But even then, I have to wonder if something more suitable to mainstream America can be devised. I want something universally acceptable, easy to use, plenty of horsepower, bug-free system software, no techno-jargon, and killer apps available for cheap. C'mon ... is that too much to ask?

So here comes the US$500 Internet device to save the day. Or standalone Web browsers. And maybe set-top boxes, if that market doesn't go the way of pen computing. Java-embedded systems, Newton, personal digital assistants, handheld schedulers, on and on and on ...

Where's that silk Honeymooners tie?

Out of this mess comes the rather bold (er, idiotic) prediction by Larry Ellison of Oracle that the personal computer will go the way of the wombat by the end of the century. The Internet device, a la "WebBoy", will take its place. People will download all their applications from a central network server, which is also where all their data will be stored. When issues of bandwidth, security, and implementation arise, there is the standard handwaving and slurred speech that somehow reduces rational thought to dust in the minds of all present.

Let's put all this in perspective.

About five years before the IBM PC hit the streets, Atari was selling these little Pong consoles. You bought this large white box with a power switch, a difficulty toggle, and two spin dials that looked suspiciously similar to the ones Radio Shack packaged with their "Do-It-Yerself Junior Ham Radio" kits. You plugged it into your television and got a nice black-and-white display. Press "Start" and this white square started streaking across the screen, bouncing around as the player's sprites jumped up and down to block potential goals.

At the time, I was far too young and far too dumb to realize my parents had spent five hundred bucks on a really lousy version of air hockey.

Is the WebBoy just Pong with TCP/IP? Sure sounds like it, right down to the display: your television. Since a monitor is far too expensive to get this WebBoy's price point below $500, the idea is that it will plug into your boob tube. Oh boy.

Who's going to want to sell this stuff? You're not selling to techno-weenies anymore ... you're selling to normal people, average people, people who'd rather watch The New Family Feud than visit HotWired. Imagine this very screenful of text scrolling by on your television. Are people going to watch it on TV? Or are they going to flip by and try to find a page with more graphics and less of that pesky text stuff? Or, are they just going to shut the whole thing off and watch The New Family Feud?

Larry Ellison and his complaints about the personal computer -- that it costs too much to upgrade and administrate -- sound suspiciously like the jabberwocky that such illuminaries as Adam Osborne and Jack Tramiel were spouting in the Eighties.

Osborne, fresh from defeat trying to sell his "laptop" CP/M system, decided to get into the software biz. (That's "laptop" as in "Christ, this laptop is crushing my testicles!") Osborne gained a lot of press with a pretty simple message. Since a word processor is nothing more than a manual and some floppy diskettes, then it should be sold at a similar price. His company, Paperback Software, was going to sell word processors and spreadsheets for fifteen bucks.

What Adam didn't quite catch at first was that you gotta pay for programmers, and office space, and test equipment, and advertising ... When his first titles came out priced around a hundred dollars, everyone got a good chuckle. When his company folded and was blown to the four winds, everyone forgot all about it and moved on.

Fast forward. Jack Tramiel, fresh from watching his company Commodore begin a slow, tortuous descent down the shitter, bought Atari Corporation from Warner Bros. and proceeded to shake up the industry with announcements of a low-cost computer system, a "poor man's" Macintosh. (That's "poor man" as in "Wow, that poor man was stupid enough to buy an Atari.") After all, he explained, a computer system "for the rest of us" should be priced "for the rest of us".

This new computer system, the Atari ST, retailed for under a thousand dollars and was bundled with a megabyte of RAM, a mouse, and a window-ish operating system. It was about as appealing to the public as ice cream is to Eskimos, but sold pretty well in Germany and France. (But what the hell do they know -- these are the folks exporting those manic-depressive "Mentos" commercials.) Atari is now stumbling around looking for a niche market to sell into ... and that market doesn't include selling their now-prehistoric Atari ST.

Memo to Larry Ellison: learn from history. Don't be lumped in with these winners. "Larry, Moe, and Curly" has a nice ring. "Osborne, Tramiel, and Ellison" has way too many syllables.