Why fast and powerful computers are especially good if you are getting old

I recall, in the very early days of the personal computer, articles, in magazines like Personal Computer World, which expressed downright opposition to the idea of technological progress in general, and progress in personal computers in particular. There was apparently a market for such notions, in the very magazines that you would think would be most gung-ho about new technology and new computers. Maybe the general atmosphere of gung-ho-ness created a significant enough minority of malcontents that the editors felt they needed to nod regularly towards it. I guess it does make sense that the biggest grumbles about the hectic pace of technological progress would be heard right next to the places where it is happening most visibly.

Whatever the reasons were for such articles being in computer magazines, I distinctly remember their tone. I have recently, finally, got around to reading Virginia Postrel’s The Future and Its Enemies, and she clearly identifies the syndrome. The writers of these articles were scared of the future and wanted that future prevented, perhaps by law but mostly just by a sort of universal popular rejection of it, a universal desire to stop the world and to get off it. “Do we really need” (the words “we” and “need” cropped up in these PCW pieces again and again), faster central processors, more RAM, quicker printers, snazzier and bigger and sharper and more colourful screens, greater “user friendlinesss”, …? “Do we really need” this or that new programme that had been reported in the previous month’s issue? What significant and “real” (as opposed to frivolous and game-related) problems could there possibly be that demanded such super-powerful, super-fast, super-memorising and of course, at that time, super-expensive machines for their solution? Do we “really need” personal computers to develop, in short, in the way that they have developed, since these grumpy anti-computer-progress articles first started being published in computer progress magazines?

The usual arguments in favour of fast and powerful, and now mercifully far cheaper, computers concern the immensity of the gobs of information that can now be handled, quickly and powerfully, by machines like the ones that we have now, as opposed to what could be handled by the first wave of personal computers, which could manage a small spreadsheet or a short text file or a very primitive computer game, but very little else. And of course that is true. I can now shovel vast quantities of photographs (a particular enthusiasm of mine) hither and thither, processing the ones I feel inclined to process in ways that only Hollywood studios used to be able to do. I can make and view videos (although I mostly stick to viewing). And I can access and even myself add to that mighty cornucopia that is the internet. And so on. All true. I can remember when even the most primitive of photos would only appear on my screen after several minutes of patient or not-so-patient waiting. Videos? Dream on. Now, what a world of wonders we can all inhabit. In another quarter of a century, what wonders will there then be, all magicked in a flash into our brains and onto our desks, if we still have desks. The point is, better computers don’t just mean doing the same old things a bit faster; they mean being able to do entirely new things as well, really well.

The reason I have been reflecting on the above argumentative familiarities is that I was recently, and for a frustratingly long time, deprived of my own super-fast, super-powerful computer. Instead, I had to make do with a much more primitive computer, in the form of a very cheap and very obsolete laptop, which I had pretty much ceased using at all, except in emergencies like this one. And the “emergency” despite daily hope that it would soon end, went on and on, and on.

There I was, back from my holiday in France. But no sooner had I posted a holiday photo-essay, with all the ease and convenience referred to in the previous paragraph, than my regular big box of a domestic computer started seriously misbehaving. It had been behaving oddly before I left for my holiday, but now, it began seriously to deteriorate, and in due course arrived at the state of not being able to load anything at all. The Man Who Does Computers For me decreed that radical transplant surgery was needed, and since the current lot of body parts, although very fast and very powerful by the standards I was familiar with, were already several years old, I thought now would be a good moment to upgrade everything, to a state of even more formidable superpower and superspeed.

But alas, contriving and checking all the required new body parts, and ensuring that they will work together as desired proved to be a frustrating process, beset by weird software misbehaviours (caused by the manner of my computer’s collapse – in rather the way that all strokes are slightly different, depending on which exact bits of the brain they happen to damage), and by hardware that (entirely coincidentally) proved unsatisfactory. The new machine is now finally working, but until that happy moment I had to endure a time of computer primitiveness far longer than I would have liked or had been expecting.

One thing about misery though: it makes you much more aware of the benefits that prevail when the particular misery you are suffering from does not. Having been forced to endure getting on for a month of computer hell, I became a lot more appreciative of the computer heaven that I had been temporarily expelled from. In its ghastly way, it was a most enlightening ordeal.

But, what an ordeal was! It might almost have been better to have had no computer at all. I had hoped to resume quite regular postings at Samizdata as soon as I got back from France, but honestly, it was more than I could bear, doing serious blogging with a machine which felt as if it had been assembled some time in the previous century. Word processing itself was okay, just about. But embedding links, for example, involves your computer being in two places at once, and that is something that the old laptop I had to make do with simply could not do. It had to go, laboriously, from one place to the other, and then laboriously back again, like a geriatric manservant in a comedy sketch.

But the good news is that this exercise in time travel gave me a whole new appreciation of the enormous contribution made by modern computers to modern life, not just for techno-magicians like many of Samizdata’s writers and readers but to to regular, dumb computer users like me, and in particular to regular, dumb computer users like me who are getting old.

For, getting old I am. For all of my life so far I have been told that I look young for my age, which is because I have actually been and still am young, for my age. (I sang boy soprano, very well, until I was nineteen.) But eventually, however young you may look compared to it, your age starts adding up to something irresistibly substantial. I never used to do old, but now I must. It’s taking a bit of getting used to, I can tell you.

Memory loss isn’t the worst of it by any means, but memory loss is very disconcerting. A few nights ago I met up with a good friend, truly a good friend. But, a good friend rather recently acquired, whom I had not bumped into for a few weeks. So, what the hell was her name? It took me about half an hour to work it out in my head. I’ve lost count of the number of times I have recently said something like: look, sorry, I know you, very well indeed, but could you please oblige by reminding me of your name. Which really will not do, because it is still far too rude. Now, I have started deploying all those Old Person expressions, of the sort much used by people like Test Match Special’s resident Old Toff, Henry Whatsisname), like “dear old thing” (Whatsisname is famous for that one) and “sunshine” and “mate” and so forth and so on. I struggle to remember the names of famous actresses, like the one who was in that famous movie called … you know, the one with the … things in it, and the other things and the scene where … that thing happened. More and more, the words I want just aren’t there at the front of the mental shelf any more.

And then there is short-term memory loss. Moments before first concocting this sentence, I made myself a cup of coffee, then I did something else, and then I came back to the coffee. Had I put sugar in? I had no line-of-asterisks-ing idea. I had to taste it to find out. I can remember articles in Personal Computer World from over thirty years ago like it was yesterday, but when washing, I now often wash parts of myself twice or even three times, because I can’t remember if those parts have been washed yet, even though if earlier washing did occur, it did so only seconds ago. This sort of thing is not now a regular or very extreme experience, but it is starting to happen too often for complete mental comfort.

Okay, so you have now read two blog postings, explicated at Old Person length (a phenomenon which is partly caused by not knowing what one has just said and feeling the need to say it again): one posting about computers improving and the other about how Old Persons deteriorate, and you may be wondering why? What have powerful, superfast, progressing computers (see what I mean about repetition) with ever more capacious and rapid-recall memories to do with human brains that are moving in the opposite direction?

The answer is that, as an Old Person, I found the switch back in time from an approximately up-to-date computer to a definitely not-up-to-date computer to be particularly disconcerting. Me now being an Old Person, I found that in some important ways, I missed my spanking fast and superpowerful computer even more than I would have done had I been twenty.

Consider the process of trying to embed links in something like this posting. This, as I say, involved an agonising wait while my primitive laptop switched its attention away from this word processing programme and towards the vastness of the internet. Eventually, after a long, long time (even though that window was already, theoretically “open”), it arrived at the ordained destination in the internet, and I with it. But what was I doing there? What was I doing, at all? Often, by the time I got to where I had earlier decided that I wanted to be taken, I had forgotten.

To hammer home (or perhaps I just mean just to say again) the point about short term memory loss, we Old People are easily distracted. This is because the latest thing that pops into our head is often, for those vital few fractions of a second when it first arrives there, the only thing there. Why is it there? No answer. It just is. So, when I arrived at a piece of writing that twenty seconds earlier I wanted to link to from some word processing I was doing, I instead just gawped at it for a second, and then saw a link to something else interesting, and then there was another wait … and I would spent the next twenty minutes lurching about hither and thither like a slow motion metal ball in an arcade machine, accomplishing nothing.

Do you see where I am going with this? Well, you probably did about five paragraphs ago, but please be polite and patient, as you would be with an old relative. My point is this. A superspeedy computer, far from being something that an Old Person like me can’t now keep up with, is actually more than ever necessary. A computer which will follow my train of thought fast enough for me not to keep forgetting what that train of thought is is no longer merely nice; it is positively essential. When it comes to me telling a computer to switch its attention, and mine with it, from place A to place B, the difference between a twentieth of a second and twenty seconds is all the difference, just as the difference between seeing a photo on your screen in two seconds rather than in two minutes was all the difference, back in the early noughts when playing with pictures on a computer for fun rather than mere profit suddenly became a reasonable thing to be doing.

A fast computer is not something that I am now getting too slow to keep up with. A fast computer is a necessity, to enable me to stay tuned in to the world. I don’t slow it down. It speeds me up, to the point where it actually keeps me going. I am lost without it.

It was fairly predictable, even to those Personal Computer World grumps who could see it but who merely didn’t like it, that the next batch of kids would find new and snazzy things to do with new and snazzy computers, and that, with the impatience of youth, the kids would want their computers to do everything, no matter how brainlessly trivial, at once. They wouldn’t need superfast computers, but they would definitely want them. But I think that the fervour, precisely because I am no longer a kid, with which I longed to get my hands back onto what was already my fastest and most powerful computer ever (and it should be even faster and even more powerful when the final lot of tweaking is done, Real Soon Now) would not have been quite so predictable thirty years ago. I remember reading that one of the earliest non-warfare related applications of computer chips was in the making of deaf-aids. So, probably, those who were then already expert in catering for the computational needs of that generation of Old People could see that even better computer power would be an even greater boon for the next generation of oldies, but I’m guessing that such specialist clairvoyance was strictly a minority accomplishment.

The moral of which is the point that Virginia Postrel and a million others have spent the last few decades insisting upon, which is that you just can’t tell what great new applications will be found for better kit, new inventions, new infrastructure, new vistas and new landscapes, real or virtual. All hail Moore’s Law!!! It is not enough to say that because you personally cannot see or refuse to see what possible use some new device or discovery might be to anyone, that therefore nothing of importance will be lost if you and your stick-in-the-mud political allies manage to put a stop to it. Solutions, once devised to solve one silly little problem, then roam the earth looking for other problems to solve, and they find them, often very big and much more serious problems compared to the original problem.

Fast computers, just a stupid trick to enable bored teenagers to play insanely intricate computer games and let lazy or impatient scientists do their sums quicker, right? Wrong. Yes, all that, but also, something to make old age far, far more bearable, and to make many other things better and nicer that neither you nor I nor even the entire Samizdata writeriat nor commentariat can now imagine.

A while back, I did an early and much shorter version of the above at my personal blog here, focussing on the particular joy of word processing, if your short-term memory is collapsing. (Word processing tells you what you just put!)

And see also this piece, about how very old Great Conductors are still able to communicate effectively with a Great Orchestra, even as their grip on everyday life collapses. (Because a Great Orchestra is a lot like a superpowerful computer!)

Thank you for reading all the way through this. You have been very patient and kind. Now off you go, you have other more important things to be getting on with. Don’t mind me, I’ll be okay (thanks to things like ever more superpowerful computers).