Have Operating Systems really gone too far

I remember getting my first Pentium based PC a little too well. It was an assembled machine that booted up with what I feel is still the best OS I ever worked on - MS DOS 6.22. However, my curiosity coupled with the advent of Windows 95 led to the installation of this new OS on the computer. We marveled at how the trash bin looked and the fact that a start menu had been added to make the entire look a little more colorful. Skip forward more than a decade and now I am using Windows 7 Starter on my Netbook. What always fascinates me about operating systems is how far we have come and how little we have learned as part of the progress we have made. I have now been using Visual Studio 2008 on my Netbook and for the most part it runs pretty well although what truly puzzles me is that it runs better than my regular notebook which sports a faster processor and a nicer hard-drive too. Over the years people have gotten accustomed to the fact that everything they do with relation to their PCs requires a pretty User Interface. This of course has also led to manufacturers building more complex software that leads people to buy faster and stronger machines. I then wonder what it would be like to have an Operating System that loaded components only when you needed them and didn't really give you all the bells and whistles on first install. Some people will argue that not everyone has the technical expertise to run such an Operating System and my response to that is the same reason that people have adopted things like Windows Starter, Ubuntu and the now approaching Chrome OS from Google.

In all honesty, the average person really doesn't need anything more powerful than a 1.6 Ghz processor to get all their work done. Does your browser really need a dual core CPU to read emails and browse YouTube? No. Does the computer need a graphics card that is capable of displaying more than 16 million colors and houses a 512 MB onboard memory card? No. Is it possible for your PC to get everything you get done today without a pretty interface? Yes. Sadly, the world likes things easy so as users we are accustomed to seeing everything handed to us on a silver platter. While this is good what we don't realize is that all the technological advances we have made might probably have come to us faster and cheaper had we really thought about how we wanted to build software and how we wanted to keep the user educated on what he/she really needed to do in order to get their work done.

I also use Ubuntu Netbook remix and to be honest, it runs faster than my Windows installation. The sad truth however is that most of my paid Microsoft applications provide better utilities for getting my work done which is why I am still using them but I'd like to imagine a world where I buy a cheap laptop that has no frills attached to it so that I can run an MP3 player, browse the internet and get my coding work done. I believe the time is right to infest the market with something that can do all of this without burning a hole in a user's pocket and Netbooks are the beginning. Sadly this won't last very long as even Netbook manufacturers are making strides and putting faster CPUs on devices that weren't meant to do all the things we think they should do. Information is getting larger to digest every day and as a result, the manufacturers have to keep up.

If someone out there in the development world is reading this and has an answer to the problem of making a PC that runs with a 1.5 Ghz processor and still affords the user a wholesome experience, my only advice to that person is to grab it while the iron is hot because there may come a time when we will have moved so far ahead that looking back at a simpler solution will be impossible because everyone using the internet will think its foolish even when its not.

Music listened to while writing this blog - Nothing

Mood while writing this blog - Optimistic