Ideas for the future
The next three paragraphs are a grumpy old man’s rant. You can safely skip them.
I’m not happy about the state of today’s technology. This is a sentence that every not-so-young-anymore person has said more than once. I work as a systems administrator. I fell in love with computers when I was a kid and have been studying and/or working with computers since that moment. But I’m not having fun with it anymore.
I’m forced to use proprietary products at work. But that’s not it. I learned to live with that long ago. But, why has a state-of-the-art laptop take ages to boot and be usable? Why is so slow just to open afterwards the email client or a text editor? Why does said text editor change what I write when I save and be unusable to simply store a collection of commands or a markdown document? And I’m just starting. Every piece of software is overcomplicated and overengineered. Layer on top of layer on top of layer of code and libraries. This just isn’t fun anymore.
On the FOSS side, things are better, but not great. The Linux kernel has become gigantic, web browsers are even bigger and so are web pages. I know that there is a price for being able to run efficiently on every device that we could think of, but I no longer feel in control of my computer.
Rant mode off.
So, is it really everything so disappointing? Not really. I’ve been reading a few books about the early days of computing and the problems that hardware and software engineers faced. And guess what? They were able to achieve great accomplishments with very little computing power. In fact, what we consider today a microcontroller is more powerful than any of their computers.
Is it possible to develop a system simple enough to be understood completely by a person which can be used for daily tasks? Well, that depends on how we define “simple”, “powerful” and the tasks to be done. But there are some research and practical examples that give me hope: Oberon, Uxn/Varvara, Isle Project, Tiny C Compiler, and many others.
I will continue studying them and, hopefully, borrowing from them what I like to build my own computer system soon. It seems that I’m really happy about the state of technology today after all.