… and it turns out that the Adventure reference was just a Trojan horse for a terrible, terrible idea.
If Cameron’s brilliant vision doesn’t turn out to be just as popular and warmly received as Clippy, I will be deeply disappointed in the series.
(OSs with natural language parsers had already been considered and rejected by this point, simply because absolutely no one on Earth actually wanted to type, “What ho Jeeves! I don’t suppose you could fire up the old Wordstar for me, what what?” when they could just type “wordstar”. The real secret to making the masses embrace tech was not to give it personality, but to make it so transparent that it vanished into the background.)
…and let’s face it, the technology of the early 80’s couldn’t handle natural language processing more sophisticated than the commands you could give to an Infocom text adventure (not that those weren’t awesome–I still remember Leather Goddesses of Phobos quite fondly).
Conversing with an OS is a neat idea that’s ahead of it’s time. We’re still trying to achieve it with things like Kinect. We’re still failing IMO but that doesn’t mean it’s not something to reach for.
It’s not the first or last time we try to humanize a PC
I dig this show. The main characters are interesting and the episodes have enough to make me come back every week.
BTW, I was on vacation in the Bay Area last week, and went to the awesome Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA (a bit north of San José). Just an incredibly cool place to check out. They have everything from the abacus to a working model of Babbage’s Difference Engine to old nearly car-sized IBM 1401’s to everything that came afterwards.
Showing my age here but… I actually worked on an application that was originally written for an IBM 1401. The 1401 had been retired in favour of a big System 360. The application ran on the System 360’s 1401 emulator, and still used punch cards.
Showing my age, I saw (and snapped a picture of) a DEC VT100 terminal–those were the nice ones to work on in the terminal rooms at Lewis and Clark College in the early 80’s (vs the dreaded Hazeltines) because they had a detached keyboard that you could put on your lap.
Other highlights: all the game consoles you could imagine were on display (even the Pippin!), the Alto computer from Xerox PARC whose GUI inspired Steve Jobs and co. so much, the Apple II, the Lisa, the original 128K Macintosh, and the Lisa computer (super expensive at launch in 1983-$9,995–also had a GUI, came with 1 whole megabyte of RAM installed, and a bigger high-res display than the later Mac’s). The original 1981 IBM PC was there too, of course.
So, re: this last episode, who else was somewhat surprised at who put the moves on whom between Donna and her boss on that business trip? I totally thought it would be the other way around.
I’m anxious to see what the “Giant” looks like in its final form.
Hmm, I found it weird that the marketing brochure for the Giant refers to it as “a compact luggable.” Isn’t “luggable” a term that arose later, when laptops were getting more compact and being compared to earlier efforts?
EDIT: That said, it was a great episode. I really hope they succeed (and create a parallel timeline, I suppose, where the Giant by Cardiff Electric was a thing).
I, on the other hand, hate all the characters* - but at least now the show is in high gear.
I’m enjoying their crazy, terrible Comdex idea, which feels torn straight from a 1980s comedy. Part of me wants/expects it all to go horribly wrong, while another part of me wants the season to end with them all celebrating in slow motion while a Journey song plays.
*Except for surprisingly sentimental bossman John Bosworth … who, for all you trivia buffs, is played by Toby Huss a.k.a. Artie, the Strongest Man in the World from the Adventures of Pete and Pete.
Yes they picked up the pace, but the show went from the merely improbable to the downright laughable, exhibit at Comdex with only working Giant… FYI, Sheldon Adelson (Comdex Godfather) is many thing but stupid about money? Never. He’d never let company display at Comdex without paying first. So they would have had to pay the $30K for the booth much earlier before the seizure…
Also didn’t we all agree that the Adventure text processor was a god awful interface for an operating system, (it was tried). Donna is a very bright woman, I can’t believe that she’d fall for the Giant with Cameron awful OS.
OMG–the big backstab that happens tonight mid-episode is horrible.
It did make me feel all warm and fuzzy to see the old but somehow new-looking (CGI probably–that plastic yellowed like a mofo with age) 128K Mac boot up. There were some great games on the compact Macs (particularly the Mac Plus), no thanks to Apple of course.
OK, I no longer hate all the characters. The Comdex episode made them all engrossing, if not always likable. And the twist was very well executed, and completely appropriate to the time and place.
It’ll be interesting to see what the series makes of this episode’s final scene in the season finale. The standard warm, fuzzy Hollywood answer is: the other characters should come to Cameron on her knees, because clearly she is right - computers are destined to be humanized, and the introduction of the Mac proves it. After all, the Mac sold like hotcakes and talking computers became the industry norm, right?
Except that didn’t happen. The talking part of the Mac was, just as we were shown, a demo gimmick (famously the actual first version of the Mac didn’t have enough RAM to run Apple’s speech synthesis program.) Mac sales struggled; instead of becoming a computer for “the rest of us,” its high price kept it a machine only for a tiny minority. Apple struggled as well, for more than 15 years. And its resurgence came not because it “humanized” tech, but because it made gizmos so easy to use that the tech becomes transparent. (Nobody bought an iPhone so they could have a long, intimate chat with Siri … well maybe Spike Jonze … but everybody bought one because It Just Worked™.)
Joe was in fact completely correct in his assessment of the 1983 computer market, as impersonal, cold, and unfuzzy as it was. Faster, smaller, cheaper was it.
Will the series give us a warm, fuzzy Hollywood ending? Or will it hew closer to what actually happened? Even this far in, I can’t tell which way the series will jump. Which is a commendation of some sort, I guess.
Of course, in the end (as whoever it was observed) “all PCs became Macs” or at least Xerox PARC Altos. The GUI was an incredibly compelling, and the command-line was always going to be the province of a relatively small contingent.
Yep! The key thing for the show, though, is that PCs (and Macs) never acquired personalities, no matter how desperately Hollywood scriptwriters and science fiction visionaries wanted them to. Humanized OSs are basically the Flying Cars trope of the computer world.
I agree with your expectations HumanTon. I’m very interested to see how it will turn out. I don’t see how Cameron can really be right however. Her OS is cute but it’s a clunker compared to what the Mac demonstrated in terms of usability. There was even a comment by one of the guys in Comdex last episode that query based inputs are not the way to go. We shall see.
BTW was it just me or did they alter the visuals on the opening credits/theme to have fuzzy depictions of the principal cast members? Maybe they were there all along but I never noticed them before.
