Computers and IT Need to be More Abstract
The computer was big and it processed much needed calculations far faster than it had been done before. The record company where I worked had taken the plunge and bought a DEC PDP-11 in an effort to speed up all the royalty calculations it had to deal with. I thought this was fascinating, but I wasn’t allowed to get my hands on it. The line printer clattered, and the eleven platters of the washing machine sized 1GB disc drive spun around, but the technicians ruled.
So I went up the Edgware Road to Henry’s Radio and bought myself a Nascom home kit computer, with its handful of 16 pin integrated circuits and a wire wrap tool to enable me to connect them all – IC3 pin 2 to IC6 pin 5, and so on. I was amazed that I hadn’t made any mistakes in that rats’ nest of connection wiring and it worked. I had to programme it in machine code, but it worked and I’d made it work.
That was 1977 and it was the last time I took a step closer to the computer. In the forty years since, I’ve been able to use more and more of the power of computing while getting ever more distant from the business of making the bits work. First came a ready-to-go table-top computer, when the most user-friendly software from Microsoft was a language compiler, then a small multi-user computer, and so on. This has been the story of computing, ever since.
The relentless journey of computing and IT has been to enable users to use more by lifting users higher and higher above the chips, wires and bits of how that power is delivered. This progressive abstraction is what’s put that power into the hands of more people, who know less and less about the technicalities, to the point where five year olds, downloading an app on their phone or tablet, have no concept of what goes into making it possible. Quite right too.