Ah, the halcyon days of the early 20th century. The birth of motoring and the start of commuting and communication for the masses.
Only the rich had a ‘horseless carriage’. They were not a mass produced commodity, but a luxury item, individually made and bought by the wealthy. Anyone who had the means could buy a ‘car’ and drive it from A to B with impunity.
In the late 1800’s, a law was introduced into the UK stipulating that all such conveyances had to be preceeded by a man on foot, waving a red flag to warn oncoming road users (pedestrians, horses, cyclists) of the approach of such a contraption. This was the earliest form of ‘road safety’ for the automobile.
Let’s come forward 100 years…cars are now an everyday thing, and indeed many households have more than one. No longer do we need the man with the flag. Over the years the ‘safety man’ has been replaced with ‘rules of the road’, traffic signals, speed limits, safety features on the vehicles and most importantly, driving licences. The driving test was introduced into the UK in the mid-1930’s and has been developed over the years. It has undergone changes in the last few years introducing a new safety section and a computerised theory test.
Yes, accidents still happen…some moron always has to overtake on a blind bend, drive drunk or generally show minimal road sense. Accidents are not caused by vehicles, but by people.
In 1986, I bought my first PC. These things were not mainstream back then! You had to get one from a specialist supplier, they were very costly and you really had to NEED a computer to justify buying one. On my bookshelf here in the office, I still have the original boxed software including the manuals. The system was a 286/12 with a 40Mb hard disk and 1Mb RAM. Installed on this system was MSDOS 4.01, Windows 3.0, Microsoft Word 1.1 and Excel 3.0…nothing else! The boxes containing the software amd manuals weigh just over 10kg (22lb), and if all the manuals are stacked up in a pile, the height of the pile measures almost 78cm (2ft 7″). The manual for MS DOS alone has 584 pages!
I’d never used a PC before, and didn’t know anyone else who had one, so the only way I could learn to ‘fly it’ was by actually sitting down and reading the manuals and teaching myself. This wasn’t a problem with the more than adequate literature!
As the years passed, 286 became 386, 386 became 486…Windows 3 migrated to Windows 3.1, then 3.10 then Windows For Workgroups 3.11. DOS5, DOS 6.0, 6.1 and 6.22 came onto the scene. Each generation of development introduced new features, more complexity and added productivity. Did I get an equivalent stack of manuals? No! Just an ever decreasing amount of documentation which eventually just noted changes from the previous version. Nowadays, a manual is almost a thing of the past! Everything comes on CD and if you trawl deep enough, you may be able to find an ‘on-line’ help file or if you are really lucky, a PDF file you can print off! Everyone assumes that because you just bought this computer, you already know how to use it.
I learned my trade progressively, and the lack of paperwork with each step up wasn’t an issue as I had my previous knowledge to build on. What about ‘first time’ users, unpacking their new XP 3Ghz with ?1000 worth of ‘bundled’ software for the first time? Just a single piece of paper showing where to plug the phone line and mouse cable into!!!
Now…there are literally MILLIONS of PC’s out there…every Tom, Dick and Harry has one…some have two or more at home…and perhaps another one just for the kids. More and more of them are being connected to the WWW.
STOP! This planet is being over-run with the damn things, and we are all colliding with each other and the traffic going to and fro on the Internet. People are going out and buying computers ‘because next door just got a bigger, better one’ or ‘the kids need one for school’.
A car, in the hands of someone who has been taught to drive and has passed a test, is a life-enhancing source of rapid transportation and communication (leaving aside environmental considerations for the purpose of this discussion!) and is generally ‘a good thing’. Give one to say a 14 year old child with no horse-sense and no training and it has the potential to become a ‘lethal weapon’, capable of death and destruction on a serious scale.
Should there be some kind of ‘driving licence’ for computer users? Should there be some ‘rules of the road’? 90% of problems I encounter with computers are related to user ignorance, 7% perhaps malicious damage and the remaining 3% is actual hardware failure.
The percentage of computers per capita of the world population is increasing almost on a daily basis, as did the growth of car ownership in the last century. Governments and safety campaigners have all played a part in making sure that driving a car is a reasonably safe practice, assuming you HAVE trained and HAVE passed a test. Is it time that manufacturers, regulatory bodies and the industry as a whole had more influence on computer useage? Should more ‘hard copy’ documentation be included with equipment and systems?
Perhaps this industry has evolved because people DON’T know what they are doing? Perhaps by educating users and asking them to prove competence before we let them loose on systems, we risk doing ourselves out of a job?
A friend of mine is an ambulance driver, and spends half of his time scraping up the remains of car accidents. As a computer engineer, perhaps 90% of my time is spent solving problems or doing routine work for people who have insufficient knowledge or simply don’t know how to do anything for themselves or have done something ‘stupid’. If the people I have to help had actually ‘RTFM’ (assuming they KNOW what Acrobat Reader is and can FIND the documentation hidden on the CD) or at least had some basic tuition in correct hardware and software usage, my job would be easier and I could get on with some ‘real work’ instead of constantly ‘picking up the pieces’ of other peoples mishaps, errors and accidents.
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