The inherent design of computers

This thought originated from some else's ruminations over on the self appointed hellsite known as Tumblr. I wish I remembered who started the discussion, but I forgot to mark the post... If you feel like the words you're about to read sound a lot like your own, please let me know so I can give you proper credit. I'll be working on implementing some form of contact soon.

Computers sure are powerful, huh? By using the concept of electricity in a way that can make a lot of small comparisons of on and off in a scale that is somehow incomprehensibly large to the human mind, yet also able to fit in an object that can be reasonably carried, we have developed a digital environment that can be used for as many purposes as there are programs, and modularity brings that up to eleven.

It is impossible to separate the concept of computing with the society we live in today. And yet, recently I was made aware of something while browsing the web.

While the concepts of computers and the Internet were both generated in a situation that required a great scientific breakthrough, it was inevitable that the areas of enterprise and office work would want to take benefit of these new technologies to foster their growth. With some of the greater developers of the basis of what we know today as operating systems being people mainly focused on business operations, it was inevitable that the way they designed the environment that would become standard for computers was influenced by their ideas.

This is a concept that requires further study, I would say, and as such, the question in my mind is: what is the relation between a modern computer and the office environment, and are they concepts that can, and should, be separated for the sake of the consumer?

The current status quo

If you are reading this, it's most likely that you are using an electronic device that has access to the internet, and as such, the capacity to connect to it. This brings forth some ideas about the environment in which this system operates. While I cannot safely assume about every possible way people can read a blog, some things are easy to establish for computer users:

  • Your computer may or may not have a desktop.
  • Your computer has folders, or directories, to organize information.
  • Your computer may refer to you as a "user".
  • Your computer saves information in files of varying types to be organized within the directories.
  • Your computer refers to executable binary code as "programs" or "applications". Rarely, these may come as "packages".
  • Your computer has a regular user function scope, and an "administrator" scope, where the administrator may perform critical functions that alter the computer's functionality.

We have long come to accept these forms of design for our computers, making them second nature to our ideas of what a computer should be like. I did not question this for a good long while, until a recent Tumblr post made me come to realize the following.

Why does the entire concept of a modern computer seem designed around the physical office environment?

An office crammed into a box

It's not a hard jump from the concept of an office to the concept of a computer, and yet it feels like that should not be true the other way around. In the era of Atari, where computers were not fully defined yet to be something universal, there was Commodore, one of the leading attempts in making a computer for the broad population, rather than limiting them for the upper class. Something I have begun to reflect upon when thinking about the limited knowledge I have of this form of computing, is the fact that, despite being similar in components to the way computers work nowadays, albeit with different technologies being applied, the way of operation was a lot different.

To operate a Commodore device, you had to insert the data device first, as those computers did not possess a lot of internal memory. However, that's where some of the differences make themselves apparent. To load in the program stored in the media (usually a floppy disk or cassette), one had to type in the run command, followed by instructions telling it where to look for the command. While this is tangentially similar to the operation of the Linux terminal nowadays, the important takeaway from this is that the user had to specify, using the LOAD command, the location of the program in the disk, the port to read, and where to put it.

Sounds random, right? But this was quite the average operation back in the day, mostly referred to as LOAD "*",8,1. If you may notice, while it's possible that some of the file structure of modern computers might have already taken hold, it's largely absent from this idea. Nothing here can be considered quite as close to a file as the direction of the program in memory, and even then it's kind of a stretch. More importantly though, computers that were designed for a specific function were only useful for that task alone, which meant that the concept of a file system didn't really originate until around the time Q-DOS, today known better as MS-DOS, started making its name known around the businesses.

This means that there was a critical (at least for this conversation) point in computing history where computer users were not in conctact with the concept of an office other than the programs designed for this purpose specifically. Rather, one could argument that they were in a far more significative connection with the workings of the computer itself. Not only that, but Commodore even offered programming books with some of their models, which implies a far more technologically adept demographic, even in the making.

But after the critical point in history where the modern ideas of a computer are established, with the "desktop" scheme taking precedence in the Apple Macintosh and truly exploding with Windows 95 and onwards, and with Microsoft pushing the file template for computing even before these, it's clear to see that the world took this new technology and ease of use and never looked back.

In the present, those who use computers and are aware of the basic mechanics of their inner working won't even blink if you ask them what do they think of the files in their computer. They are as prevalent as the power button in the casing. Whether we like it or not, this model of a digital office environment is now the standard of how we can imagine a personal computer, and even server computers, seeing as they also operate with a similar "file" structure. And yet I am left to wonder: Is this truly the best way a person could conceptualize a computer?

Why this kinda sucks a bit

While at this point the filesystem protocol is ingrained into everything, to the point where every single element in Linux based systems can be classified as a file, one has to wonder the implications. Due to the way a power hierarchy is imposed on the system, everything is fit to give control to one person and leave others at their mercy, which, while an advantage to an institution and irrelevant to a single user system, can become an issue when it comes to several users on a single system due to the control difference. Not only does it render some of the users incapable of several tasks, it also places responsibility upon the administrative user to not screw things up for everyone else. Additionally, this kinda creates a mental limit on what a computer can do to some people. Due to this idea, it brings forth the mental image that computers are mainly designed to surf the web and write documents, whereas in truth, the concept of a computer can reach so much further than that.

Are there any alternatives?

It's hard to say at this point. While the concept might not be the best one for creative people, there is no lack of acknowledgement that it's an efficient way to organize several packets of different information. Additionally, it was in this format that we got some of the greater advancements in computing, thanks to the ability to packet several protocols into one file type. Despite this, it is worth pondering the advantages and drawbacks of basing one of the current cornerstones of our existence in the image of a system designed to organize things in such a way as to maximize profit to the ones in control while offering minimal retribution to the ones responsible...

But that last part is a thought for another day.