An interesting take on personal computing

Below is an excerpt from Salon.com's Hallelujah, the Mac is back -

'When discussing the PC business, an important thing to remember is that nothing's quite settled yet. The personal computer is a young product, and the PCs we have today are not the PCs we'll have forever. David Gelernter, the Yale computer scientist, raised parts of this argument in December in an Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, published on the occasion of IBM's sale of its personal computer business to Lenovo, a Chinese firm. Gelernter lamented that sale; it indicated, he wrote, that IBM no longer saw potential for the greatness of the PC, and that this "is a shame, even a tragedy -- because the modern PC is in fact a primitive, infuriating nuisance. If the U.S. technology industry actually believes that the PC has grown up and settled down, it is out of touch with reality -- and the consequences could be dangerous to America's economic health."

A conversation with Gelernter is an eye-opening experience. As modern computer users, we go through our lives resigned to mediocrity; this is true of Windows users, but it's even true, he says, of Apple users. The computer can be so much more than the systems we have today. Gelernter wants machines that are 'transparent,' that are more like appliances than fancy gadgets, machines that put your data, your information, before their own idiosyncrasies. 'I don't care about the machine, I care about my documents,' he says. It shouldn't matter which computer he goes to in his house, or whether the machine he's on is new or old; he should get access to his life on any machine. And why should anybody spend any time at all 'securing' your machine from outside threats, he wonders. Why can't the machine do this for you? 'Most people don't want to spend their time to download the latest thing to deal with the latest disaster to strike,' he points out. Would we deal with such tediousness for other products we use on a daily basis? 'Would anyone ever say, "Hey, my brakes don't work but that's O.K., I can just download a new anti-lock braking system." No; you wouldn't use a car in which the brakes didn't work. Yet we put up with computers all the time in which key functions just stop working, and, routinely, we are OK with that."

If only all our wishes would come true, but this piece also points out so well how far behind the computer technology really is. I sometimes find that hard to remember...