Blogmudgeon

Once upon a time, in a land far away—I bought my first computer. In 1985, I spent every dollar that I had to purchase a Compaq Portable Plus, the very first IBM PC compatible computer. This tasty box was all I could think about.  It was a little over $3600, and had an incredible 128K of memory, and two 5 ¼” floppy drives that one was consumed by the operating system—DOS 3.2—in a case that resembled a sewing machine. It was wonderful! In those days, the race was not to upgrade your software, but to build the hardware system. By 1993, this 30 pound behemoth had a 1.44Mb floppy disk, a 20Mb hard disk, 640K of memory—a new Panasonic processor–with a 1Mb extension card. Good God, and a 9600 Bps modem!

There was no public internet, so this marvel let me get into several dial-up bulletin boards that operated out of people’s homes! Unfortunately, in those days as this–a lot of what was found was cheap porn.  As to graphics on the green monocolor screen, a draw was like this—I would issue the command to open the file, got up and go pour a cup of coffee. Step out on the back porch, and have a smoke. Return to the computer 8-10 minutes later, and watch as the draw—usually a vector graphic—complete its task.

Now later in the Windows age (beginning with Windows v3.0 on a 386 processor computer) I began to cut my teeth on helping others set up, and maintain small business networks. Novell was king of this heap at the time. It is interesting to observe that anti-virus, adware, and spam filtering was not necessary—nor was it a regular thing to have to update software or anything else except to load a new application on the computer. This was a good time—and everything that could possibly go on a computer was less than 15Mb. Amazing, isn’t it? I still have that old Compaq, and incredibly enough, it still runs and does everything that it is capable of doing…

In the interim, I became a system administrator, set up complex Windows Active Directory servers and oversaw a dozen servers and nearly a hundred workstations. Every week became a challenge setting up new barriers—antivirus, firewalls, adware protection, and the new bane of computing—UPDATING SOFTWARE TO PLUG BAD PROGRAMMING IN THE PREVIOUS VERSION. What was this? Holes that someone found that could be exploited to gain control of one’s computer, or just mess up someone’s day. An image grew in my mind of the dutiful corporate software programmer sitting at home at night writing nasty malware to ensure job security and have a great joke at the expense of the end consumer.  And then I became sick of it all, and moved on.

Just last week, I fired up a computer for my amateur radio system that had been shut down for nine months. One major upgrade, and 67 other upgrades later, the operating system was back in sync with today. The antivirus software had to be upgraded to a completely new version—and this did not have anything to do with the numerous updates to all of the software that resided on the computer. What a joke—and it still required further updates for security holes and program flaws. Amazing how we are required to spend big money to test flawed software for developers, and shell out more money for improved versions of software that was supposed to be good in the first place…

Our problem these days is companies who shovel the same old garbage out to us—dressing up old broken software—and asking us to pay for fixing it. Am I the only one who has an issue with this? Where once I found a challenge and fun in making applications work together, and work for many people at the same time, I now find myself working just to keep my own computers running properly and free of hacker garbage. How has this happened?

The truth of the matter is that a lot of money is made in adding bells and whistles to programs that hardly anyone uses—but unless the upgrade is made puts them out of touch with those who do make the upgrades. We are regularly attacked by those whom little effort is made to locate—and even smaller effort is dedicated to prosecuting. Just like everything else in American or world economies—there is too much money made in responding in a passive way to threats than eliminating them. It seems that the mistakes in programming have become a valuable commodity to those who are standing by to “help” us plug them.

I just received a call today from a friend, who could not access their Firefox web browser without crashing. 52 updates later, this problem resolved itself. Meanwhile, this person had “automatic updates” activated for their computer. The real tragedy here is that we continue to pay our money out to various software vendors, antivirus companies, and other “supportive” applications and do not really complain. Switch to Apple? Sure, improve the market share that they hold (beyond about 5% at an incredible and unwarranted cost for the hardware) and see how quickly the target includes those machines. There seems no escape.

Where once I enjoyed exploring and developing computer systems, I have now come to hate them. Better software, such as WordPerfect for writers, has been forced to a ground zero because Microsoft has taken over the corporate and word processing world. This article was produced in Word—not because I wanted to, but because I had to. And only six updates in the last two months enabled me to do so.

When will we get tired of this game, and demand some accountability and value from our software providers? Oh, excuse that thought—Windows 7 in coming—hurry to be the first to upgrade, and find out how many devices you can no longer use, and things that are not permitted for you to do anymore before they offer you the next 1001 updates to keep it running. I hate computers—and think that I got a lot more done, and in a more intelligent manner with my old IBM Selectric typewriter…

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