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A while back I posted about The TED Experience, a site that has videos of talks from a regulartalk-fest on the subjects of Technology, Entertainment & Design. One video that fulfills all three criteria is, I think, that of Caleb Chung.

Computers are tools of work as well as a means for users to enjoy things they might not otherwise see or experience. But computers don’t have to be a box with a screen, keyboard and mouse. They can be packaged in other ways, sometimes ways that are simply fun to be around.

Caleb Chung has spent years working with toys, as well as considerable time putting together working models of a variety of types. Perhaps you remember or even have a furbie? Cute little toys that had a variety of simple responses and movements. Caleb Chung made them.

Pleo’s are dinosaur toys, and Caleb apparently spent considerable time to make them as close to the real model as he could. While I can’t really comment on the accuracy of his model, I must say they are cute. Even on screen they evoke an empathic reaction, like seeing a puppy. It’s remarkable that someone could put together basic equipment that is capable of bringing such a reaction, similar to that we feel for living creatures.

And Pleo’s come with USB and memory card slots for user upgrades and changes!

Even more remarkable is that humans, the same people who can kill and maim with such apparent ease, can find caring feelings for a toy, for a collection of plastic and metal bits, while simultaneously turning away from their troubled fellow man.

One of the first uses to which the personal computer was put was bookkeeping. It actually predates using it to write. Very early on there was a program called Lotus123, a spreadsheet with basic formula functions that let users do numeric manipulation.

In a similar business model to Apple, Lotus threw away the chance to ‘own’ the world of spreadsheets by charging a small fortune for their product and going to ridiculous lengths to ‘protect’ their product, including things like, in Australia, if something went wrong with the install, the owner had to return the original boot disk to Lotus in Sydney, who had to send it back to the UK to get a new one.

Meanwhile, back in the office, the user, (usually a business) had no access to their data… for up to six weeks! And you couldn’t copy the boot disk to get around this problem because they put a hole in the actual disk to make it impossible!

So when a new program came along without these stupid restrictions, the world turned to it and Lotus123 quickly became a bit player on the scene. VP-Planner was a Lotus clone, but the big winner was Excel. Originally made for the MAC, Excel was ported over to Win-doze in the early days and it was good enough that it probably saved Win-doze from a slow death. (anyone who experienced Windows v1 or 2 promptly became a death-wisher for the product)

Excel actually came with a built-in switch to allow the user to swap it over to the Lotus123 keystrokes to make Excel more compatible and reduce the retraining needed to swap to the product. I’m not sure now because I am using Office 2007, http://www.themsoffice.com/ but I think the switch was still there in Office 2003.

And of course, things have gotten much more friendly with programs like Quicken and MYOB (Mind Your Own Business)

How many computers do you have?

How about printers?

What about scanners?

In the 1980’s personal computers became a reality. In the beginning (more…)

Internet computing has a long history - longer than most of you would believe. It began back in the 1960’s and has two roots. One is the desire of Universities to connect up their computers and the other, more well-known is the original DARPA set up. (Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency)

The web cam was one of the first graphics uses for the internet; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/03/07/worlds_first_webcam_coffee_pot/ documents the demise of the coffeepot involved.

Where most people come to know the internet is at the point when the graphical interface was added and we had the birth of the World Wide Web (www) Now, after more than a decade (more…)

When computers first became personal (according to Mr JM) they were rather expensive. You can get a cell phone now for one tenth the cost of his first computer and the phone will out-perform the XT computer in every way. With a printer, he paid nearly $3,000 for a one megabyte, twin floppy drive XT computer. The floppy disks held 360kb (that’s right kilo-bytes, not megabytes) each.

His first hard disk came six months later and was a whopping thirty megabytes!

Not only was $3,000 a lot more money back then, you (more…)

When Mr JM began computing, the Apple computer company was in its infancy. According to him, they made an almost fatal mistake – they locked down the architecture, sued the pants off (or threatened to) anyone who dared to try to imitate them, (in spite of the fact they ripped off the WIMP interface from Rank Xerox) and over-priced their machines to almost absurd levels.
(WIMP = Window, Icon, Menu, Pull-down)

IBM, on the other hand, introduced a much inferior computer, opened the architecture, & didn’t care if people copied them. Consequently, today, there are at least 50 Windows PC’s out there for every MAC.

There were a few other faux pas as well; inability to expand the machine you’d paid $5,000 for, holding onto a nine inch grey screen even when the standard everywhere else was a fourteen inch 256 colour VGA screen, and eventually a clunky single button mouse when even IBM was releasing a two button version.

Mr JM says also that you can tell someone who began their computer experience on a MAC by the fact they bang the mouse on the desk before they move it. (Apparently the MAC mouses had ‘sticky’ balls,  and you had to lift them & tap them on the desk to get the pointer to begin moving)

Now they have the MAC-Air. Lovely looking machine, light, thin, everything a catwalk model should be – and about as intelligent.

To quote Tech Republic, Computer Guru site… (more…)

Computers have become ubiquitous in our lives. In the 20th century, there was an explosion of knowledge across many fields and many pundits described it as an exponential growth. In a hundred years we went from riding horses to riding in luxurious cars at a pace that would frighten our ancestors. From using leeches to suck blood to a myriad of drugs and surgical treatments to treat the ills foisted on us by our modern life.

In ‘1984’ and other classic books, the future was seen as dark and totalitarian and the computer was seen by many as the harbinger of doom that would enable the enslavement of society. While many of the ‘dark’ predictions have come to pass, (steadily increasing numbers of laws to regulate us, statements from government that mean the exact opposite of what they say, new media that simply parrots what the powers-that-be want to tell us) the computer turned out to be a tool of hope for people.

It may change soon with the coming of ‘Internet 2’ which passes far more control back to officialdom, but when computers arrived, it meant a smart person could match it with the big boys – and they did. Originally just a plaything of tech types, the PC quickly became a mainstream tool.

The original IBM PC came with a 360KB floppy disk drive, (no hard disk) and a massive 640KB of memory. For colour screen you could choose green text or sometimes amber text.

(more…)

Continued from yesterday…

MS Vista and MS Office continue on the upgrade path, yet talking to Mr JM, and by experience among friends and colleagues, nobody actually uses more than 10 or 15% of the features included. Most people would be just as productive with Windows 98SE and Office 97, yet release after release is sold and the ongoing chase for your hard-earned cash continues.

When Windows XP first released, it came with a need for 64MB of RAM and could actually be run on 32MB. With Service Pack 3 just released, (see here for details if you’re technically inclined) you’d find it difficult to get decent performance with less than 256MB of RAM and 512MB would be better.

Vista is released with a suggested minimum of 1GB of RAM, but anyone trying to run it in that configuration will be very disappointed with the performance – practical resources would be 2GB or better. Office 2007 runs reasonably in 512MB of RAM but is happier with 1GB or more.

We’ve come a long expensive way from 1MB RAM in your desktop!

So, what to do about it? Well unless you’re a gamer, or your business is high end computer use such as graphics design or video editing, simply ask yourself, ‘Is my computer doing all I need of it?’ And remember, internet browsing is distinctly NOT one of the high end reasons for a top-of-the-line computer. If your PC is doing all you require of it, stick with it. A standard desktop should last 5 years (or more) and laptops in business use commonly have a turnover time of 3 years.

If your PC does all you need but does it too slowly, bookmark this site and call back regularly – I’ll be covering things you can do to speed it up, to clean it up, to upgrade only needed parts, and to protect your PC and information from outside interference.

Remember, you can ask questions or post experiences and I will answer them – if I can’t, Mr JM will be able to help and I will pass along his experience.

Windows, Office, ungrade

This is a story of intrigue, misdirection, conning the public and money gathering that beggars the imagination. It’s also an unstoppable game being played that fits in seamlessly with our consumer society.

The Wintel Game. The game has been played now for so long that the main player can release its main product knowing in advance that it can announce a major repair of things gotten wrong and its clients will still buy the original. One player has dropped to the background a little, forced out of the forefront by the limitations of technology, or rather of physics. But Microsoft (MS) rolls on.

What is the ‘game’? It’s been running for quite some time, ever since the guy who stated that he could see no reason why anyone would ever want more than 1MB (MegaByte) of memory in their PC. That’s right, 1 MB! You most likely have 20,000 times that (2 Gigabyte) in your USB drive. Cameras commonly have 5,000 times that amount.

Then Bill Gates and Intel got their heads together and so began the Wintel Game. How it works is this… You buy a computer, whiz-bang-for-your-buck and state-of-the-art. Within a few months, MS releases a new version of Windows, or perhaps of MS Office that pushes the boundary out further. Your pride and joy now runs slower and soon you see that flashy new Intel computer being advertised and find a need to upgrade your hardware to regain the speed you had on your original machine.

One way they did this is by inserting Easter Eggs in the software. Easter eggs are undocumented codes that will run various functions (there was a flight simulator hidden in Excel 97 and Excel 2000 had a game). MS is supposed to have officially stopped inserting Easter eggs, but there was only ever one reason to do it – Easter eggs increased the size of the executable file and so brought the user closer to requiring an upgrade of their hardware.

So as we explore further into the computing world, and as you learn the tips and tricks I glean from the labyrinthine mind of a professional Helpdesk engineer, you will be better placed to decide if you want to continue playing the Wintel Game.