This past week, I came to a sobering, depressing realization. The latest, newest technology is not necessarily the best. As I eagerly waited half an hour for my computer to update itself to the latest version of its operating system, I envisioned that when it was done, I would have a computer free of bothersome bugs, glitches and ever-annoying blips. My fantasy world of make-believe lasted all of 26 hours. Then, in quick succession, my computer coughed up on connecting to Dartmouth Secure and refused to shut down until I gave it the dreaded sustained finger jab. Time to start waiting for the next series of updates.
Despite this fiasco, I decided to upgrade my computer to the latest version of Microsoft Office. While I thought that this would give me faster applications that would run smoother and actually do more, all I have gotten is a suite of buggy programs that crash regularly and prevent me from getting my work done as fast as before. While my experience has not been all bad, at this point, I was happier before I upgraded.
Now that I have driven most (if not all) readers away by complaining about things that annoy me, let me get to the point. While new technology is shiny and exciting, it almost never reaches its full potential out of the box. Most of the time, it is just too complex for programmers to grasp until months, if not years, after its release. Every year, computer chips get incrementally faster. Yet why does it still take me a minute or more to start my computer in the morning? Why am I not experiencing any of this newfound speed? Along those same lines, why am I charging my new cellphone every day when my old one could go a week between charges? Sometimes, I just want to go back to the days of yore when things were simpler (and technically slower).
There's a charming sense of comfort about old technology, except for nightmares like Windows Me. Everything seems less threatening. Maybe because we expect less, we get more out of it.
How awesome was it to play Super Mario Bros on a Super Nintendo Entertainment System for the first time? Even now, I still have urges to find an old Game Boy and play Pokemon (only Red and Blue, I don't believe in any of the later versions). To a large extent, I feel like a lot of new technology is a waste. Old technology can be just as effective as the brand spanking new stuff, sometimes even more so.
Perhaps I am just waxing nostalgic because Polaroid has decided to begin abandoning the instant film market, not that there was much left. Outkast will sound so silly five years from now. Polaroid will go the way of the dinosaurs. But dinosaurs were still really sweet.
Way back when laptops were just starting out as merely more than an idea and a twinkle in the eye, Apple created the PowerBook 100. It had a small black and white screen and a trackball mouse. It may have only had floppy disks, but people were still able to crank out Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Plus, that black and white screen was one of the clearest, most legible screens ever. Black and white trumps all but the best color displays. Try looking at your cellphone on a sunny day and you will see what I mean. Outdoors, color screens become washed out, while black and white stays crisp and clear.
One of these days, when you are cleaning out an attic or basement, dig through an old pile of gadgets. Hopefully some of them will work and you can start to see what I am talking about. Electronics used to be like people; they had limitations and potential. Now they are just cold blocks of machinery that think they are better than us. Let's hope they don't try to take over.
