This is Chris's "Some thoughts on Computers" – the final, edited form.

The basic design of computers hasn't changed much since the mechanical one, the Difference Engine, invented by Charles Babbage in 1822 – but not built until 1991.  

Ada Lovelace was the mathematical genius who saw the value in Babbage’s work, but it was Alan Turing who   invented computer science, and the ENIAC in 1945 was arguably the first electronic general-purpose digital computer. It filled a room. The Micral N was the world's first “personal computer,” in 1973.

Since then, the basic design has changed little, other than to become smaller, faster, and on occasions, less useful.

The current trend to lighter, smaller gadget-style toys – like cell phones, watches, headsets of various types, and other consumer toys – is an indication that the industry has fallen into the clutches of mainstream profiteering, with very little real innovation now at all.

I was recently looking for a new computer for my wife and headed into one of the main laptop suppliers only to be met with row upon row of identical machines, at various price points arrived at by that mysterious breed known as "marketers". In fact, the only difference in the plastic on display was how much drive space had the engineers fitted in, and how much RAM did they have. Was the case a pretty colour, that appealed to the latest 10-year-old-girl, or a rugged he-man, who was hoping to make the school whatever team? In other words, rows of blah.

Where was the excitement of the early Radio Shack "do-it-yourself" range: the Sinclair ZX80, the Commodore 8-bits (PET and VIC-20),which ran the CPM operating system, (one of my favorites) later followed by the C64? What has happened to all the excitement and innovation? My answer is simple: the great big clobbering machine known as "Big Tech".

Intel released its first 8080 processor in 1972 and later followed up with variations on a theme, eventually leading to the 80286, the 80386, the 80486 (getting useful), and so on. All of these variations needed an operating system which basically was a variation of MS-DOS, believed to have been based on QDOS, or "Quick and Dirty Operating System," the work of developer Tim Paterson at a company called Seattle Computer Products (SCP). It was later renamed 86-DOS, after the Intel 8086 processor, and this was the version that Microsoft licensed and eventually purchased. Or alternatively the newer, FOSS, FreeDOS. 

Games started to appear, and some of them were quite good. But the main driver of the computer was software.

In particular, word-processors and spreadsheets. 

At the time, my lost computer soul had found a niche in CP/M, which on looking back was a lovely little operating system – but quietly disappeared into the badlands of marketing. 

Lost and lonely I wandered the computerverse until I hooked up with Sanyo – itself now long gone the way of the velociraptor and other lost prehistoric species.
 

The Sanyo bought build quality, the so-called "lotus card" to make it fully compatible with the IBM PC, and later, an RGB colour monitor and a 10 meg hard drive. The basic model was still two 5¼" floppy drives, which they pushed up to 720kB, and later the 3.½" 1.25MB floppy drives. Ahead of its time, it too went the way of the dinosaur.

These led to the Sanyo AT-286, which became a mainstay, along with the Commodore 64. A pharmaceutical company had developed a software system for pharmacies that included stock control, ordering, and sales systems. I vaguely remember that machine and software bundle was about NZ$ 15,000, which was far too rich for most.  Although I sold many of them over my time.

Then the computer landscape began to level out, as the component manufacturers began to settle on the IBM PC-AT as a compatible, open-market model of computer that met the Intel and DOS standards. Thus, the gradual slide into 10000 versions of mediocrity.

The consumer demand was for bigger and more powerful machines, whereas the industry wanted to make more profits. A conflict to which the basic computer scientists hardly seemed to give a thought.

I was reminded of Carl Jung's dictum that “greed would destroy the West.” 

A thousand firms sprang up, all selling the same little boxes, whilst the marketing voices kept trumpeting the bigger/better/greater theme… and the costs kept coming down, as businesses became able to afford these machines, and head offices began to control their outlying branches through the mighty computer. 

I headed overseas, to escape the bedlam, and found a spot in New Guinea – only to be overrun by a mainframe which was to be administered from Australia, and was going to run my branch – for which I was responsible, but without having any control.

Which side of the fence was I going to land on? The question was soon answered by the Tropical Diseases Institute in Darwin, which diagnosed dengue fever… and so I returned to NZ.

For months I battled this recurring malady, until I was strong enough to attend a few hardware and programming courses at the local Polytechnic, eventually setting up my own small computer business, building up 386 machines for resale, followed by 486 and eventually a Texas Instrument laptop agency. Which was about 1992 from my now fragile memory.  I also dabbled with the Kaypro as a personal beast and it was fun but not as flexible as the Sanyo AT I was using.

The Texas Instruments laptop ran well enough and I remember playing Doom  on it, but it had little battery life, and although rechargeable, they needed to be charged every two or three hours. At least the WiFi worked pretty consistently, and for the road warrior, gave a point of distinction.

Then the famous 686 arrived, and by the use of various technologies, RAM began to climb up to 256MB, and in some machines 512MB.

Was innovation happening? No – just more marketing changes. As in, some machines came bundled with software, printers or other peripherals, such as modems, scanners, or even dot matrix printers. 

As we ended the 20th century, we bought bigger and more powerful machines. The desktop was being chased by the laptop, until I stood in my favorite computer wholesaler staring at a long row of shiny boxes that were basically all the same, wondering which one my wife would like… knowing that it would have to connect to the so-called "internet", and in doing so, make all sorts of decisions inevitable.  As to securing a basically insecure system which would require third part programs of dubious quality and cost. 

Eventually I chose a smaller Asus, with 16GB of main RAM and an NVIDIA   card, and retreating to my cottage, collapsed in despair. Fifty years of computing and wasted innovation left her with a black box that, when she opened, it said “HELLO” against a big blue background that promised the world – but only offered more of the same.  As in, a constant trickle of hackers, viruses, Trojans and barely anything useful – but now included several new perversions called  chat-bot or “AI”.

I retired to my room in defeat.

 

We have had incremental developments, until we have today's latest chips from Intel and AMD based on the 64-bit architecture first introduced around April 2003.

So where is the 128-bit architecture – or the 256 or the 512-bit?

What would happen if we got really innovative? I still remember Bill Gates saying "Nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM." And yet, it is common now to buy machines with 8 or 16 or 32GB of RAM, because the poor quality of operating systems fills the memory with badly codded garbage that causes memory leaks, stack-overflow errors and other memory issues.

Then there is Unix which I started using at my courses in Christchurch polytechnic.  A Dec 10 from memory which also introduced me to the famous or infamous BOFH.
 

I spent many happy hours chuckling over the BOF’s exploits. Then came awareness of the twin geniuses: Richard Stallman, and from Linus Torvalds, GNU/Linux. A solid, basic series of operating systems, and programs by various vendors, that simply do what they are asked, and do it well.

I wonder where all this could head, if computer manufacturers climbed onboard and developed, for example, a laptop with an HDMI screen, a rugged case with a removable battery, a decent sound system, with a good-quality keyboard, backlight with per-key colour selection. Enough RAM slots to boost the main memory up to say 256GB, and video RAM to 64GB, allowing high speed draws to the screen output.

Throw away the useless touch pads, and gimmicks like second mini screens built in to the chassis. With the advent of Bluetooth mice, they are no longer needed. Instead, include an 8TB NV Me drive, then include a decent set of controllable fans and heat pipes that actually kept the internal temperatures down, so as to not stress the RAM and processors.

I am sure this could be done, given that some manufacturers, such as Tuxedo, are already showing some innovation in this area. 

Will it happen? I doubt it. The clobbering machine will strike again.

- - - - -

Having found that I could not purchase a suitable machine for my needs, I wandered throughout the computerverse until I discovered in a friends small computer business an Asus ROG Windows 7 model, in about 2004. It was able to have a RAM upgrade, which I duly carried out, with 2 × 8GB sodim ram plus 4GB of SDDR2 video RAM, and 2×500GB WD 7200RPM spinning rust hard drives. This was beginning to look more like a computer. Over the time I used it, I was able to replace the spinning-rust drives with 500GB Samsung SSDs, and as larger sticks of RAM became available, increased that to the limit as well. I ran that machine, which was Linux-compatible, throwing away the BSOD [Blue Screen Of Death – Ed.] of Microsoft Windows, and putting one of the earliest versions of Ubuntu with GNOME on it. It was computing heaven: everything just worked, and I dragged that poor beast around the world with me.

While in San Diego, I attended Scripps University and lectured on cot death for three months as a guest lecturer. 

Scripps at the time was involved with IBM in developing a line-of-sight optical network, which worked brilliantly on campus. It was confined to a couple of experimental computer labs, but you had to keep your fingers off the mouse or keyboard, or your machine would overload with web pages if browsing. I believe it never made it into the world of computers for ordinary users, as the machines of the day could not keep up.

There was also talk around the labs of so-called quantum computing, which had been talked about since the 1960s on and off, but some developments appeared in 1968.

The whole idea sounds great – if it could be made to work at a practicable user level.  But in the back of my mind, I had a suspicion that these ideas would just hinder investment and development of what was now a standard of motherboards and BIOS-based systems. Meanwhile, my Tux machine just did what was asked of it.

Thank you, Ian and Debra Murdoch, who developed the Debian version of Linux – on which Ubuntu was based.

I dragged that poor Asus around the Americas, both North and South, refurbishing it as I went. I found Fry's, the major technology shop in San Diego, where I could purchase portable hard drives and so on at a fraction of the cost of elsewhere in the world as well as just about any computer peripheral  dreamed of.  This shop was a techs heaven so to speak. And totally addictive to some on like me.

Eventually, I arrived in Canada, where I had a speaking engagement at Calgary University – which also had a strong Tux club – and I spent some time happily looking at a few other distros. Distrowatch had been founded about 2001, which made it easy to keep up with Linux news, new versions of Tux, and what system they were based on. Gentoo seemed to be the distro for those with the knowledge to compile and tweak every little aspect of their software.

Arch attracted me at times. But eventually, I always went back to Ubuntu –  until I learned of Ubuntu MATE. The University had a pre-release copy of Ubuntu MATE 14.10, along with a podcast from Alan Pope and Martin Wimpress, and before I could turn around I had it on my Asus. It was simple, everything worked, and it removed the horrors of GNOME 3.

I flew happily back to New Zealand and my little country cottage.

Late in 2015, my wife became very unwell after a shopping trip. Getting in touch with some medical friends, they were concerned she’d had a heart attack. This was near the mark: she had contracted a virus which had destroyed a third of her heart muscle. It took her a few years to die, and a miserable time it was for her and for us both. After the funeral, I had rented out my house and bought a Toyota motor home, and I began traveling around the country. I ran my Asus through a solar panel hooked up to an inverter, a system which worked well and kept the beast going.

After a couple of years, I decided to have a look around Australia. My grandfather on my father's side was Australian, and had fascinated us with tales of the outback, where he worked as a drover in the 1930s and ’40s.

And so, I moved to Perth, where my brother had been living since the 1950s. 

There, I discovered an amazing thing: a configurable laptop based on a Clevo motherboard – and not only that, the factory  of manufacturers Metabox was just up the road in Fremantle.

Hastily, I logged on to their website, and in a state of disbelief, browsed happily for hours at all the combinations I could put together. These were all variations on a theme by Windows 7, (to misquote Paganini) and there were no listing of ACPI records or other BIOS information with which to help make a decision.

I looked at my battered old faithful; my many-times-rebuilt Asus, and decided the time had come. I started building. Maximum RAM and video RAM, latest NVIDIA card, two SSDs, their top-of-the-line WiFi and Bluetooth chip sets, sound cards, etc. Then, as my time in Perth was at an end I got it sent to New Zealand, as I was due to fly back the next day. 

That was the first of four Metabox machines I have built, and is still running flawlessly using Ubuntu MATE. I gave it to a friend some years ago and he is delighted with it still.

I had decided to go to the Philippines and South east Asia to help set up clinics for distressed children, something I had already done in South America, and the NZ winter was fast approaching.  Hastily I arranged with a church group in North Luzon to be met at Manila airport.  I had already contacted an interpreter who was fluent in Versaya and Tagalog, and was an english teacher so we arranged to meet at Manila airport and go on from there.

Packing my trusty Metabox I flew out of Christchurch in to a brand new world. 

The so called job soon showed up as a scam and after spending a week or so In Manila I suggested that rather than waste visa we have a look over some of the country.  Dimp pointed out her home was on the next Island over and would make a good base to move from.

So we ended up in Cagayan de Ora – the city of the river of gold!  After some months of traveling around  we decided to get married and so I began the process of getting a visa for Dimp to live in NZ.  This was a very difficult process, but with the help of a brilliant immigration lawyer, and many friends, we managed it and next year Dimp becomes a NZ citizen.

My next Metabox was described as a Windows 10 machine, but I knew that it would run Linux beautifully – and so it did. A few tweaks around the ACPI subsystem and it computed away merrily, with not a BSOD in sight. A friend of mine who had popped in for a visit was so impressed with it that he ordered one too, and that arrived about three months later. A quick wipe of the hard drive (thank you, Gparted!), both these machines are still running happily, with not a cloud on the horizon.

One, I gave to my stepson about three months back: a Win 10 machine, and he has taken it back with him to the Philippines, where he reports it is running fine in the tropical heat.

My new Metabox arrived about six weeks ago, and I decided – just out of curiosity – to leave Windows 11 on it. A most stupid decision, but as my wife was running Windows 11 and had already blown it up once, needing a full reset (which, to my surprise, worked), I proceeded to charge it for the recommended 24 hours, and next day, switched it on. “Hello” it said, in big white letters, and then the nonsense began… a torrent of unwanted software proceeded to fill up one of my 8TB NVMe drives, culminating after many reboots with a Chatbot, an AI “assistant”, and something called “Co-pilot”. 

“No!” I cried, “not in a million years!” – and hastily plugging in my Ventoy stick, I rebooted it into Gparted, and partitioned my hard drive as ext4 for Ubuntu MATE.

So far, the beast seems most appreciative, and it hums along with just a gentle puff of warm air out of the ports. I needed to do a little tweaking, as the latest NVIDIA cards don’t seem to like Wayland as a graphics server, and the addition to GRUB of  acpi=off, and another flawless computer is on the road.

Now, if only I could persuade Metabox to move to a 128-bit system, and can get delivery of that on the other side of the great divide, my future will be in computer heaven.

Oh, if you’re wondering what happened to the Asus? It is still on the kitchen table in our house in the Philippines, in pieces, where I have no doubt it is waiting for another rebuild! Maybe my Stepson Bimbo will do it and give it to his niece.  Old computers never die they just get recycled

— Chris Thomas

In Requiem 

03/05/1942 — 02/10/2024 

                                                  Some thoughts on Computers

The basic design of computers hasn't changed much since the mechanical one, the Difference Engine, invented by Charles Babbage in 1822 – but not built until 1991. Alan Turing invented computer science, and the ENIAC in 1945 was arguably the first electronic general-purpose digital computer. It filled a room. The Micral N was the world's first “personal computer,” in 1973.

Since then, the basic design has changed little, other than to become smaller, faster, and on occasions, less useful.

The current trend to lighter, smaller gadget-style toys – like cell phones, watches, headsets of various types, and other consumer toys – is an indication that the industry has fallen into the clutches of mainstream profiteering, with very little real innovation now at all.

I was recently looking for a new computer for my wife and headed into one of the main laptop suppliers only to be met with row upon row of identical machines, at various price points arrived at by that mysterious breed known as "marketers". In fact, the only difference in the plastic on display was how much drive space had the engineers fitted in, and how much RAM did they have. Was the case a pretty colour, that appealed to the latest 10-year-old-girl, or a rugged he-man, who was hoping to make the school whatever team? In other words, rows of blah.

Where was the excitement of the early Radio Shack "do-it-yourself" range: the Sinclair ZX80, the Commodore 8-bits (PET and VIC-20), later followed by the C64? What has happened to all the excitement and innovation? My answer is simple: the great big clobbering machine known as "Big Tech".

Intel released its first 8080 processor in 1972 and later followed up with variations on a theme [PDF], eventually leading to the 80286, the 80386, the 80486 (getting useful), and so on. All of these variations needed an operating system which basically was a variation of MS-DOS, or more flexibly, PC DOS. Games started to appear, and some of them were quite good. But the main driver of the computer was software.

In particular, word-processors and spreadsheets. 

At the time, my lost computer soul had found a niche in CP/M, which on looking back was a lovely little operating system – but quietly disappeared into the badlands of marketing. 

Lost and lonely I wandered the computerverse until I hooked up with Sanyo – itself now long gone the way of the velociraptor and other lost prehistoric species.
 

The Sanyo bought build quality, the so-called "lotus card" to make it fully compatible with the IBM PC, and later, an RGB colour monitor and a 10 gig hard drive. The basic model was still two 5¼" floppy drives, which they pushed up to 720kB, and later the 3.½" 1.25MB floppy drives. Ahead of its time, it too went the way of the dinosaur.

These led to the Sanyo AT-286, which became a mainstay, along with the Commodore 64. A pharmaceutical company had developed a software system for pharmacies that included stock control, ordering, and sales systems. I vaguely remember that machine and software bundle was about NZ$ 15,000, which was far too rich for most.

Then the computer landscape began to level out, as the component manufacturers began to settle on the IBM PC-AT as a compatible, open-market model of computer that met the Intel and DOS standards. Thus, the gradual slide into 100 versions of mediocrity.

The consumer demand was for bigger and more powerful machines, whereas the industry wanted to make more profits. A conflict to which the basic computer scientists hardly seemed to give a thought.

I was reminded of Carl Jung's dictum: that “greed would destroy the West.” 

A thousand firms sprang up, all selling the same little boxes, whilst the marketing voices kept trumpeting the bigger/better/greater theme… and the costs kept coming down, as businesses became able to afford these machines, and head offices began to control their outlying branches through the mighty computer. 

I headed overseas, to escape the bedlam, and found a spot in New Guinea – only to be overrun by a mainframe run from Australia, which was going to run my branch – for which I was responsible, but without any control.

Which side of the fence was I going to land on? The question was soon answered by the Tropical Diseases Institute in Darwin, which diagnosed dengue fever… and so I returned to NZ.

For months I battled this recurring malady, until I was strong enough to attend a few hardware and programming courses at the local Polytechnic, eventually setting up my own small computer business, building up 386 machines for resale, followed by 486 and eventually a Texas Instrument laptop agency.

These ran well enough, but had little battery life, and although they were rechargeable, they needed to be charged every two or three hours. At least the WiFi worked pretty consistently, and for the road warrior, gave a point of distinction.

[I think Chris is getting his time periods mixed up here. —Ed.]

Then the famous 686 arrived, and by the use of various technologies, RAM began to climb up to 256MB, and in some machines 512MB.

Was innovation happening? No – just more marketing changes. As in, some machines came bundled with software, printers or other peripherals, such as modems.

As we ended the 20th century, we bought bigger and more powerful machines. The desktop was being chased by the laptop, until I stood at a long row of shiny boxes that were basically all the same, wondering which one my wife would like… knowing that it would have to connect to the so-called "internet", and in doing so, make all sorts of decisions inevitable.

Eventually I chose a smaller Asus, with 16GB of main RAM and an nVidia card, and retreating to my cottage, collapsed in despair. Fifty years of computing and wasted innovation left her with a black box that, when she opened, it said “HELLO” against a big blue background that promised the world – but only offered more of the same.  As in, a constant trickle of hackers, viruses, Trojans and barely anything useful – but now included a new perversion called a chat-bot or “AI”.

I retired to my room in defeat.

We have had incremental developments, until we have today's latest chips from Intel and AMD based on the 64-bit architecture first introduced around April 2003.

So where is the 128-bit architecture – or the 256 or the 512-bit?

What would happen if we got really innovative? I still remember Bill Gates saying "Nobody will ever need more than 640k of RAM." And yet, it is common now to buy machines with 8 or 16 or 32GB of RAM, because the poor quality of operating systems fills the memory with poorly-written garbage that causes memory leaks, stack-overflow errors and other memory issues.

Then there is Unix – or since the advent of Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, GNU/Linux. A solid, basic series of operating systems, by various vendors, that simply do what they are asked. 

I wonder where all this could head, if computer manufacturers climbed onboard and developed, for example, a laptop with an HDMI screen, a rugged case with a removable battery, a decent sound system, with a good-quality keyboard, backlit with per-key colour selection. Enough RAM slots to boost the main memory up to say 256GB, and video RAM to 64GB, allowing high speed draws to the screen output.

Throw away the useless touch pads. With the advent of Bluetooth mice, they are no longer needed. Instead, include an 8TB NVMe drive, then include a decent set of controllable fans and heatpipes that actually kept the internal temperatures down, so as to not stress the RAM and processors.

I am sure this could be done, given that some manufacturers, such as Tuxedo, are already showing some innovation in this area. 

Will it happen? I doubt it. The clobbering machine will strike again.

Friday September 20th 2024