Next I'd like to get rid of all those connectors. USB, PS/2 mouse, keyboard, firewire, SCSI, cablevision, video, parallel, serial, LAN, modem, external monitor, etc etc. I want one kind of connector and I want it to work for everything. Everything should go through a single supercable. Or better yet, just be wireless, although all those batteries, or fist-sized power bricks I can do without. And there should be at least eight of those connectors. USB has it pretty right as far as form factor and ease of use, but it isn't fast enough for video and most computers still don't come with enough jacks and an external hub is a pain.
As for drives, I want one drive that reads and writes all CD-size formats. I don't miss my floppy drive anymore (got a USB keychain drive) and I don't want to pay in battery life to have extra spindles. I'd also like to see all the flash memory providers get down to just one format. I understand all about vendor lock-in, but I don't have to put up with it.
Now despite what Bill Gates thinks, I still want a computer with a keyboard. I've been working almost exclusively on my relatively competent Thinkpad for the last six months, and it is nearly a perfect hardware platform. Everything is included: big bright TFT display, built-in UPS (by way of its battery - saved me one afternoon when the power went out,) it goes anywhere, it plays movies on DVD, expansion is pretty much irrelevant, and the only thing I find myself going back to the desktop computer for is 3D gaming (love that GeForce 4 Ti.) I use its single USB connector for an infrared mouse - a considerable improvement on older mice, it is so nice not to have to clean it every couple of weeks.
The system also has to be quiet. In order to remain cool enough to continue to operate properly, my current PC has seven fans and sounds like a dishwasher. The strangest sound of all is when the UPS finally gives up during a power outage and all the computers are off. Silence. I truly miss the days when my Hazeltine Esprit III terminal was connected to my noisy CPM system by a 100 foot cable and my workspace was completely quiet. Even my Thinkpad has a fan, albeit a quiet one.
I read one survey that indicated that nearly 30 percent of business PC purchases are now portables, I expect to see that number rise in the coming years as the sheer inherent sense of the platform comes to be appreciated by more and more computer users.
Truth be told, I'd like to see most of today's OS' gone, and I don't think I'd miss them. They all have tons of baggage from the old days and I'm just tired of the sheer weight of it all. No more NetBios, IPX, Appletalk, command prompts, Adobe, TrueType, FAT, VFAT, FAT32, NTFS, HPFS, JFS, ext2, LVM, AVI (in all of its flavours), WAV (in all of its flavours), BMP (in all of its flavours), GIF, ACPI, APM, all of it. It is alphabet soup and completely unmanageable even today.
Most PC's today are fast enough to run whatever legacy systems you really can't live without in emulation reasonably well. IBM is making big money selling mainframes that run multiple copies of Linux for big servers. Each instance of the client OS is protected from each other, and they run fast because of the hardware. This sounds like a pretty good model for the workstation as well.
Device driver issues will become a thing of the past. When you plug in a new hardware device, the system will automatically retrieve a basic driver from the device itself, then try to update to the latest and greatest via whatever sort of internet we have. The OS won't waste space storing every possible driver for every possible device like newer Windows OS' seem to.
Installing all your favourite software by inserting CD after CD and answering interminable questions, meeting prerequisites and doing workarounds will also be a thing of the past. Much like Windows update works today, you'll tick off a list of the software you want to run on the system from your local software server or your favourite software vendor's website, go have a coffee, and when you come back all the latest software, security fixes, and other updates will be installed painlessly and without a bunch of system reboots. If you're have a network, you'll be able to do the same for all of your workstations remotely. We'll also finally have a way to move your personal PC configuration from one machine to another as you move.
The system will be designed to be secure. Not like Windows where any half-decent website programmer can hijack your PC, nor like UNIX where you use text files, octal math and CHMOD to set up security. Programs will be protected from mucking with each other and the operating system. And when things go wrong in applications, they'll be terminated cleanly and give you some helpful information about what went wrong and what you can do about it. I don't want to see any more Haiku error messages. They're cute, but ultimately not helpful enough. God save me from the mysterious "system error 26".
And when I talk about secure, I don't mean DRMS. I really don't need the movie or record industries telling me what I can and cannot do with the information in my computer. They've proven over and over again that they really have no idea what they're doing and that they will hurt their best customers given opportunity.
IP V6 will be the universal communication standard in use and everything will ultimately come down to 128-bit addresses and all the cool features that the new protocol includes (read up on it, it is very interesting.)
The folks at Be had the right idea when it came to programming interfaces for developers. They were new, clean, and relatively well designed based on modern computing concepts, like OS/2 was, and how Windows most definitely has never been. Microsoft has the right idea with each new version of Windows jettisoning some particularly warty part of "classic windows" but they can't go far enough without alienating their customers.
Developer tools will also need to be better than what is available today. Making software will be easier. And I don't think I'm putting myself out of a job by making it so. Accountants are still going to better spend their time doing accounting, as are lawyers, but for us programmers, we won't spend so much time agonizing over the details of GUI layout or reinventing the wheel. Tools like Visual Basic are a step in the right direction for improving programmer productivity, but they don't go nearly far enough. I've never understood why developer tools are so poor, even today. You'd think programmers would want to improve their own lot.
I appreciate the value of legacy support, but I think the whole PC industry has become so unwieldy that it is time that we jettison the bulk of it and move on to smaller, more efficient, faster software and hardware systems with simpler designs. Palm has certainly shown the value of this design strategy.
We've proven we can run the legacy stuff if we need to, but why should we have to?
What do you think? Bring your opinion to the forums.
Robert Basler is the president of
Aurora Systems, Inc. (http://www.aurora-systems.com)
and has been a dedicated OS/2 user since he tired of rebooting Windows 3.1 twenty times a day.
He spends what free time he can manage travelling the world. Photo was taken at Franz Josef
glacier, New Zealand.
This article is courtesy of www.os2ezine.com. You can view it online at http://www.os2ezine.com/20020716/page_3.html.