The following came out of an email discussion this evening with friends. It sums up some questions that have been nagging at me for a while about why it is that everyone seems to want to speed all over the "Information Superhighway" but most of them don't know where they're going...or even how to drive... Pat 01/28/97 (Snip snip) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From salsbury@bootstrap.sculptors.com Tue Jan 28 00:58:55 1997 Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 00:55:38 -0800 From: Patrick Salsbury To: Emperorxiv@aol.com CC: ryan@interpac.net, jprisco@lightlink.com, jinx@albany.net, kc3032@cnsvax.albany.edu, pb2845@cnsvax.albany.edu, queenmab@clarityconnect.com, craziboy@pacbell.net, robindoherty@worldnet.att.net, schoenbe@nwfsl.rz.fh-hannover.de, bakerr2@idol.union.edu, dlopez@clarityconnect.com, jh1570@cnsvax.albany.edu, chrissa@ni.net, salsbury@bootstrap.sculptors.com In-reply-to: <970127161749_647468877@emout05.mail.aol.com> (Emperorxiv@aol.com) Subject: Re: Net Computers ->From: jprisco@lightlink.com ->if we all had cable modems and could access the 'Net ->as fast as we access our hard drives, that would be fine, but we don't ->have these yet and probably won't for a year or more. But why the hell do you need to access the net so quickly? This is what I've been trying to figure out for a while now, and I'm still mystified. What? You want to download someone's advertisement at blinding fast speed? Give me a break! You want to download the latest Java-Applet "Dancing Monkeys" on someone's web page? (Dancing Monkeys are our new unit of measuring crap on the web. Spread the meme around... ;^) ) They tell you that you "NEED" these fast modems because they want to spew more garbage at you at a faster rate. If you want high-speed garbage, watch TV. The internet wasn't made to compete with TV, so why try to make it do what TV already does better? The message I'm replying to, including all the header info and email addresses, had 2016 characters in it. Without the headers, it was 1523 characters. On a 2400 baud modem, it would take less that 7 seconds to download the entire message. On a 14.4, it would take about 1. On a 28.8 it would take about .5 seconds. Big deal. It still takes 30-60 seconds to read it. And it still takes about 5-10 minutes to write a decent reply. What's a few more seconds of download time? Especially if it's running in the background while you're doing something else? In the 10 minutes I'm taking to write a thoughtful reply to you, my 14.4 modem (which I use to run my house, and my website) can download about 1Mb of mail for me. That's about 250 more email messages. (I just checked a 2Mb mailbox from one mailing list and it has 513 messages in it.) How long would THAT take you to read? You don't "NEED" a fast modem, if you set the machine up to do the work for you, and keep your stuff running locally. Think about universities: 5 years ago, most of them only had 14.4 or 19.2 modems. There just wasn't anything faster. And yet they ran email and news for THOUSANDS of people. They did it by running the services locally. You didn't dial across the country to log into a machine. You logged into one on campus. I don't dial into someplace to do my email. I log into my Linux box in the house. When I hit the "send" key, it makes its way out to the net, and over to you. I never notice modem speeds for that. -From: Emperorxiv@aol.com -You know I'm talking out my ass since I'm not in the computer industry like -Joe. It just seems like a logical progression to me and I think it would be -foolish for anyone to be pessimistic about where technolgy is headed. I *AM* in the computer industry. I work smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley, and all day long, week in and week out, I hear people talk, and I see magazine ads, and the friggin' dancing monkeys on the web, and they all trumpet how I "NEED" to upgrade my modem. I "NEED" to buy a Pentium. (Not lasts week's unfashionable model! Oh, noooo! The new, flashy, expensive one! Can't do ANYTHING with anything less powerful!) It's crap. Most of the people who tell you this are salesfolks who really don't know fuck-all about computers. I know, because I have to fix their computers for them when they break them. :-) It *IS* astonishing where technology is headed. That's part of why I like living here. It's amazing! But all the salesdroid garbage and the consumer mentality gets to be a real drag after a bit. Everyone jumping around yelling Spend! Spend! SPEND! when they don't know how to work what they've already _got_. -Also, I just can't help but think about a large sector of the market who -just can't afford current p.c. prices - hello Mindy! I mean, I spent about -$1,500 about two years ago and my computer is basically no more than a -fisher price toy. I'm willing to bet you've got something as good, (or better) than I do. I'm running a 486 DX2/50Mhz machine. It currently has 32Mb of RAM (I upgraded it a couple of weeks ago from 20Mb, where it's been for most of 2 years) and a bit less than 1Gb of disk space. (We've bought a new 3.2Gb disk, but haven't installed it, yet...things are improving with time.) We run a 14.4 modem. Not a 28.8. Not a 33.6. Not a 56K. Not a cable modem. (We do have 2 ISDN lines, but one isn't working right, yet, and the other computer isn't connected to our network, so it's currently just for Stacie to dial into work.) I don't own a Pentium. What do I do with my dinky 486? I run sculptors.com with it. It's my domain, running out of my house. I'm writing this email on it. I run X Windows on it. There are accounts for Stacie and myself, several friends & former houseguests, plus my brother, sister, and mother, who telnet in from Oswego, NY. I run an FTP server on it. Plus a website. (http://www.sculptors.com/) I'm going to start bringing USENET news in, too, once I get the new disk installed. We have 4 terminals in current operation around the house. One at the foot of our bed. Another here near the main console in the computer room. One downstairs in the living room, and one in the guestroom for when we have visitors. (That one is on a 50' cable, so we can put it out on the back deck during nice weather, and do email under the redwoods. :-) ) I'm willing to bet that the only thing Fisher Price about your computer is the Microsoft operating system that's running it. It's cute. It's bright colored and has little pictures all over, and only one person can play with it at a time. But with the same hardware, and some new, FREE software, you could be running all the programs you know from college. Emacs, vi, elm, pico, pine, tin, trn, rn, nn, IRC, hunt, moria, nethack, Netscape, Mosaic, xemacs, xpaint, PPP, SLIP, multimedia, sound programs, scientific applications, astronomy software, chemistry software, cool games... The list goes on... -If advances in technology are going to be making everything you purchase -obsolete after a certain period of time, I can't help but think it would be -wiser to spend less money to take each step. Microsoft doesn't want you to know this. Microsoft doesn't make any money off of people like me. Microsoft writes crappy, slow software that NEEDS (really, honestly does!) a 133Mhz Pentium just to give snappy performance. (I have a 386 Linux notebook with 8Mb of RAM, and it will do email and shell login sessions that are more than adequate for my typing speed.) They write bloated word processors and applications that fight with each other to hog memory, so that you have to run out to buy more, and more, and more. Linux is written by hackers and college students. People who don't have to pay Marketing or Sales departments, and who don't have lots of money to blow on the fanciest hardware, so they program _smarter_ to make their hardware do more. ->Also, where would ->you store files if you did do word processing? You'd either need space on ->the Net somewhere (in which case the Internet is acting like the world's ->biggest hard drive - a technology it was not designed to do) or local ->storage: a floppy drive (antiquated) or a hard drive, which NCs probably ->don't have because if you have a hard drive, why not add expansion slots ->and voila! you'd have a PC. -> -In everyday practice, when I type letters I print out two copies and file one -away. I don't store things because I can't afford the harddrive space and in -the long run, I need a hard copy more anyway. - -Aaron - Actually, the net IS getting to be more and more like a big hard drive. Or like a Network Filesystem, anyway. Stacie and I were discussing this, yesterday. It seems that the computer industry keeps re-inventing the same things over and over, with new names and packaging. -10-15 years ago, it was terminals. Text-based screens with keyboards, and they allowed you to log into central servers. -Then they added drives and slots, and made PC's, which you attached a modem to, to dial into a central server. -Then you got X-terminals, which would do graphics, and did away with those pesky hard drives (Sound familiar, yet?). You had a mouse and keyboard, and could do all sorts of nice graphics work, and save it all on...you guessed it: central servers. -Then there were workstations, which were like the X-terminals, but had hard drives. They networked to each other, and more powerful central servers. -Then came the souped-up PC's, with power to compete with the workstations. All the graphics, and big drives, and faster modems to connect to Internet Service Providers (Central Servers!). -But it seems that the people keep getting into trouble with these. They're tricky. They're complicated. They break. They get General Protection Faults. So let's take away the slots, and the floppy, and the hard drives. We'll keep the keyboard, mouse, and graphics. We'll keep 'em hooked to the Net at high speed, and store everything on a central server someplace... Yeah... It's new... It's hot! It's the Latest, NEWEST thing! Not at all like those X-terminals. Not a generation or so from the original text terminals. No sirree... It's...it's.... The Network Computer Ho hum. :-) OK, after all that buildup, perhaps you see that there's just a twinge of hype that's going on. NC's are a good idea. They're just not a new idea. And pricing seems to stay about the same for NEW computers, although they get more powerful. You bought a new computer 2 years ago, Aaron, for about $1500. I saw new computers in the paper and at the computer store tonight that were about... $1500. In about 2 more years, they're still going to be $1500. They'll be more powerful, but people still won't know how to use that power. For a couple of hundred dollars, or even for free, you can get 386 computers, and put free Linux software on them. When I worked at SCO, who makes Unix software for the business world, they used to run 386's with 16Mb of RAM and these would be SERVERS (central servers!) that would run 16, or 32, or 64, or *96* terminals out of them. They would handle email and news and login sessions for ROOMS and FLOORS full of people! I have several of these machines sitting in the room with me. SCO threw them away last year, and gave me piles of old, "useless" stuff. I've been rebuilding the good bits into more useful, more powerful systems. I've also got lots of old terminals that they were throwing away. I've got boxes of keyboards, cables, mice, and about half a dozen monitors, in various states of disrepair. Also some old "small" 100/200/300Mb hard drives. All old. All "useless". My point? That you don't HAVE to spend $1500 on a new computer. You don't even have to spend $500 (which is what they're aiming for with NC's, people are still wondering if they'll make it.) You can find stuff that other people are chucking out, and make use of it. I use the green screen terminal downstairs more often than I do the main graphics console upstairs. Even now, I'm on the main console, and running it in white text on a black screen. I'm doing email. I don't need dancing monkeys. I don't NEED lots of cool pictures (although I've got 'em if I want 'em), and I don't NEED music (although, if I'd know this note would take so long to type, I would have put it on a while ago! ;^) ). That's my tirade for the evening. Don't beleive all the marketing hype. It's just what They want you to do. You can do more with just about ANY computer built since 1990 than you'll probably get a chance to figure out. No need to rush off to upgrade all the time. If you've got the money, and you want to get a good one, by all means, get a good one. But then LEARN how to use it. Don't go out and replace it in a year or two. I started building this computer (Bootstrap) about 2.5 years ago. He's just now starting to take shape into a really cool, powerful system. (Made some new additions to the website this weekend. Might want to check it out... This is going up there, soon. I like how it's turned out.) No way I'm gonna scrap all this work just because Microsoft is offering a new Office97 Business Pack, or some such shit. :-) Ok, so this took MORE than 10 minutes to reply to. closer to an hour, actually (Plus another half-hour to proofread and edit). But I'd like to think it's got some quality to it. (It at LEAST has some honesty to it! ;^) ) This is line 222, counting the headers. It's 12,885 characters, up to that digit "1" in 12,885. Rounding that to about 14000 characters which is about the length of the finished doc, on my 14.4 modem, it's going to take 7.88 seconds to transfer out of here. On a 2400 baud modem, it would take about 47.33 seconds. On a 28.8, it would take you 3.94 seconds to download it from your ISP. I know for a FACT that it's going to take you much longer to read it. :-) In the hour I've spent writing it, I've only received two other messages while typing it, but that was in the background, so they're waiting for me, along with lots of other stuff I haven't read, yet. In that hour, I could have been downloading about 6 Mb of email, which would be about 1500 messages. Or some cool software program that will take me weeks to learn how to use properly, and months or years to master. So I'll ask again the same question I started this thing out with: Why the HELL do you need to access the net so quickly? ;^) Live, from the epicenter of the Digital Shockwave... Pat ___________________Think For Yourself____________________ Patrick G. Salsbury http://www.sculptors.com/~salsbury/ ----------------------- Don't browse the internet, study it.