by Carla Schroder
Managing Editor
Well here we are in the 21st century, and my burning question of
the day is: Why are computers so dratted slow? I remember all the
way back to the 286 CPU. You didn’t get any kind of graphical
interface with that, and it had a tiny amber or green screen. Dual
5.25″ diskettes, no hard drive, etc. blah blah, you know the specs-
uphill both ways in the snow. My first “real” PC was a 386 with 4-
count ’em, 4 whole megabytes of RAM. I worked mostly in MS-DOS
because Windows 3.1 was almost as useful as a sack of bent
nails.I know that performance really has increased a lot, and
applications are more complex and powerful than ever, but it
doesn’t always feel like it. I have nice modern systems with
gighertz CPUs and boatloads of RAM and big fast hard drives. If
these machines were people they would win athletic events. And yet
my CPU redlines when I hit certain Web sites. I know that modern
script-insane crappily-coded sites are notorious for bogging down
Web browsers- but why does it bog down my whole system? Sometimes I
can’t even switch to a different application until the dratted
thing calms down.So I try different browsers- sometimes Konqueror works well,
sometimes Firefox, sometimes different versions of Firefox, and
sometimes Dillo is the hero of the day.Now that I think about it, Web surfing is my #1 source of both
happiness and irritation. I love having a whole world of
information at my fingertips, and talking to people all over the
world. Uh oh, I just had another horrifying thought- if television
and modern marketing are homogenizing influences, eradicating
cultural identity and reducing everyone to Velveeta, Levi’s, and
Britney, what will the Internet do?But let’s not get distracted from the main point, which is a lot
of Web sites are slow, buggy wastes of time, and it seems the
bigger the company the worse their site is. They don’t seem to be
getting better, and the current fad is moving all computing to the
Web browser. Isn’t this just like standardizing transportation on
the Yugo?I’m probably being too pessimistic. After all, we take
telephones for granted; I’ll wager the early years were pretty
bumpy, and people went around grumbling about bad service and gummy
connections and by gosh, carrier pigeons were still the most
reliable message transport. Still, you’re not going to catch me
messing with Google Docs or any of these other newfangled
buzzworded contraptions until a couple of generations of early
adopters have suffered sufficiently. If the Internet gets any more
polluted, unsafe, and slow, I just may revert to yellow tablets and
pens. Or pigeons.