jmoiron.net

Haven't been writing mostly for want of time. Wanted to drop this, for what it's worth.

It's the holiday season, and you know what that means. Time to provide technical support to relatives! I felt obliged to help out my great uncle with some video games that my godfather had sent him from Portugal. He said he had a disc, but didn't know what to do with it; how to get them installed.

I went up to his place and sat down at the machine. It wasn't on. I live in a world where computers are always on, for some reason, or another, or none, but this one wasn't. Turn it on, and it boots up into Windows 98.

Microsoft stopped supporting this operating system a while ago, and for good reason. It is still inexorably tied to DOS, and the shell is pretty bad. The whole machine locked up completely at least 5 times as I tried in vain to access the cdrom drive (start->run->(random letter:) .... nope, failure). Finally, I get it to boot where it'l show me what drives are what; his optical drives are F and G. Oookay.

Eventually, I'm about to give up, because I can't open any kind of explorer window on any directory at all without a full system lockup. Then I ask him, "Does internet work?" He says yeah, he clicks on the blue E. Bingo; Microsoft's monopolizing finally works to my advantage. I copy a bunch of games (which are mostly simple 3.1 and 95 era games) to his desktop to a directory named "Jogos", and we're on our way.

This story is not particular interesting. But a few things about his computer were interesting to me. He had what must have been a 8 year old hard drive that seemed to work just fine (probably off half the time, never been overwritten). He had a brand new-ish samsung syncmaster 17" LCD screen, which looked like it was displaying @ 640x480 at 256 color depth. I contemplated asking him why it was that way, but I knew the two possible answers: he didn't know it can be changed, or higher resolutions made the text too small.

Questions of resolution independence aside, I think my Uncle is a pretty typical pre-internet computer user. This is how most people used their machines before computers became central entertainment and socialization appliances. He had various directions scribbled out there on a pad on how to get a shortcut icon on the desktop, and various other passwordy strings. It really was a blast from the past, on the whole.

I think that this generation of computer user is going the way of the dinosaurs fast. I'd love to see some patterns of his usage, to see what it's like for a user of this type to use a computer, but kids are learning it now at that age where they just absorb knowledge at ridiculous pace; I can't imagine too many lost computer users in 20 years. On the whole, people at least think they know the technology space these days. They understand how to maximize their utilization of whatever gadgetry they buy into. Now they have to wake up fast and see how companies try to pull the rug over their eyes with schemes to artificially contract that space of possibility in their devices with lockware, drm, etc!