Happiness: best administered in small doses

One word about computers today: "abundance." There is too much of everything. Gigabytes. Million polygons per second. Do I like it? "Yes, if I can control it."

And I'm not sure how. The amount of knowledge needed cannot be crammed into one human brain; I am reduced to "push this button and it works".

It didn't use to be this way.

There was a wonderful thing in my life, ten years ago - FIDO. A pre-Internet message board that you dialed into every night (with a modem) and pulled in the latest stuff: people discussing things, commenting on what you said. I remember the anticipation of returning home and dialing in for the "latest." It had been a whole day. Someone might have answered me. Some people contradicted and insulted each other for weeks.

It was fun because you knew everyone by name, and gauged their personalities as you read more of their posts.

Why was this "wonderful"? We have a million web forums today, and they are complete drags. In a funny way, each wants to be "the" forum, which of course doesn't happen: if it dies, there are N-1 left.

But with FIDO, you had to watch what you said. A slip of the keyboard in a moderated forum, and you're banned for 2 weeks. The operators had your phone number; getting a new one was unthinkable. And FIDO was the only network. It was a scarce thing.

Why I'm talking about "scarce" will become clear after you see this picture:

http://homepage.mac.com/citizensane/kill_for.jpg

It's from an "old computing" nostalgia site (notice the name of the file).

A 30-something used his 3-GHz machine to post a fond picture of an old clunker that couldn't do anything.

Part of it, of course, is that "after a while, all memories become good memories."

But still.

Computers could do little back then, but what they did, made you happy. You could talk to friends on FIDO (and wait a whole day to hear back), you could play 2-D sidescrollers in 256x256 graphics, and it made you happy.

The ability to extract the most out of that limited hardware made you happy.

What about today? In every programmer is a person tired of climbing up the mountain of learning. At some point we admit we shouldn't know it all.

And with that, we give up the chance to be happy through computers. We don't create; we interact by probing a huge system that's not worth understanding because it will be obsolete soon.

So what's to do? Keep learning, catch up, be professional about it: you can never understand the whole. An admission of defeat.

Performance is trivial. There is no mastery involved in extracting a billion polygons per second: just add more hardware. And the happiness of achievement is gone.

Which is why people drool over an ancient computer with black-and-white graphics, and yawn through the presentation of the PlayStation 3.

I'll make a silent confession: I can't wait for Moore's law to be over. We can then go back to getting the most out of what we have, instead of building our software houses on sand, since we're moving next year anyway.