SLOAN RANGER
A personal list of the top developments in software since the launch of Post Database
WANDA SLOAN
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| In the early days of PCs, there were 20 competing standards for typing, reading and printing Thai. By 1995, TISI had begun to get on top of the problem. |
Our little baby is 20 years old. Ahhhhh! It's so exciting and it's so sad to see them grow up.
Unless you filched this page from someone engrossed in the other articles, you are aware that Post Database has turned 20, which means that life may start to get really interesting.
I'm not going to review programs today, except over at the Appshot shop. Instead I am going to put my feet up - figuratively, of course.
There were computers 20 years ago, although few of us had useful ones that were good for much except entertainment. The PC age was under way but largely limited. Geeks, nerds, a few curious businesses and people with a lot of time on their hands were aware something was happening.
Early software reviews were often about quaint software, and often showed the combination of enthusiasm and amazement that the reviewers had for those 20th century PC programs. Here is my personal list of the top 10 developments in software since the launch of Post Database.
10. Spreadsheets. The first mass-market software was Visicalc, a brilliant concept that put the accountants' books on the screen and added the world's first computer "What If?" button. Today, almost any business in the world without a computer-run spreadsheet program is as unthinkable as a dentist's office without three-year-old magazines.
9. Graphics editors. My first Post Database software review was a simple program where you could import, draw and edit cartoons, not much better than the early edition of Microsoft Paint that came with early Windows.
Today we have Photoshop and hundreds of rival, simpler and add-on programs that allow you to build and edit photos and graphics. If you doubt the importance of the graphics editor, look at this newspaper and the daily wrapper that goes around it.
Almost everything you see on TV and at the movies depends on such software. And of course you use it to make those photos from last month's vacation look so much better.
8. MP3s. Turning the native analogue beauty of all music into digital form was an important development, and the CD is the most important marketing tool of the music industry in the late 20th century. But the German engineers who made the MP3 standard, while dabbling in the Eureka 147 DAB digital radio research project, changed our world.
MP3s are small, "good-enough" quality for almost anyone and can easily be edited, compiled and turned into vast collections for play at home, at work and sitting in the traffic jams.
7. Databases. When Post Database was young, people with computers were expected to have, and to learn a database application. dBase was a big money earner. For most of us, this was like calculus - something to be learned but not all that useful. We didn't need one or two database programs.
What we needed, it turned out, were scores, hundreds, thousands of specialised databases. And that is what we have.
Consider a world without databases. Our cellphones wouldn't be all that great because we wouldn't have a phone book. Amazon would have no way to show us "books by the same author," Yahoo Mail would be unable to show us the latest email at the top of the list, and even Google would have problems finding "similar pages". We don't do databases, but we sure do consume them.
6. Freeware and open source. As I write this column, a consortium of some of America's biggest companies have compiled a list of reasons not to buy or bother using Windows Vista by Microsoft. The "list" has one item: Linux.
Of course I am biased, but there is really nothing that you can do on a computer which requires that you buy proprietary software to do it. People already are making billions of dollars from open source programs, and by adding quality, know-how, features or ability.
Free and open-source software doesn't have to replace Microsoft and Oracle to be relevant and important, although it might. The point is that it is a continuously growing, continually vital part of both business and personal computing.
5. The World Wide Web and the browser. When readers saw the first Post Database story, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau were worried about their physics courses and figuring out the commands for the Gopher information-storage system of the Internet. Three years later, they showed off the World Wide Web and something called Mosaic, the software needed to download, render and show the information and - get this - pictures!
It actually took another five years for the web to become even partly available to many in Thailand. (Remember, the information that drove the 1992 Black May uprising came from CDs and BBSes, not the Internet.)
Younger generations have adopted the web faster than they adopted spaghetti straps. From a society viewpoint, the web and the browser may be the most important development of the first decade of the millennium.
4. Search engines. Without the search engine, the web would be less populated and maybe half as useful, if that. "To google" is a verb, the Yahoo toolbar is seen everywhere, the phone book has become something of a curiosity, and no one rings the airport to find out when a flight is arriving.
Of course, search engines can't find everything by any means. "Results 1-20 of about 10,900 for 'new dance partner' (0.17 seconds)" is not entirely helpful. But without them, the digital age would be gasping for oxygen.
3. WYSIWYG. This is perhaps the most overlooked advance in computers. "What you see is what you get" has made it possible for computer screens to speak Thai. Once, there were 20 different ways to show Thai on the screen, and software had to take that into account. Speaking of freeware, the brilliant, fantastically useful Thai Easy Writer and CU Writer (by Chulalongkorn University, geddit?) couldn't even show on some computers.
Credit Windows or Apple or Xerox Park if you wish, but behind today's computer displays lies a combination of the early graphics cards and the desire to get documents in every language on the computer screen.
Twenty years ago, Post Database featured long, sometimes immensely technical articles on how to see a photo, or how to get the Thai alphabet on the screen. Today, it simply happens.
2. Email and attachments. There is no more fax. Just when it seemed we were going to have to cut down every tree broader than a thumbnail to get it on paper, just when the slogans about a paperless office were becoming jokes, the Internet brought a solution.
Little software comes over the transom any longer here at the intensively gaudy yet somehow always tasteful Post Database suites high above the Mother of Waters. Instead, we get it attached to email or via a web link.
1. Word processing. I warned you this would be a personal list. Twenty years ago, we mostly wrote stories on typewriters, smudged our hands with the carbon paper needed to make copies, cut stories with real scissors, pasted new paragraphs from real paste pots.
Today's word processors are full-fledged pre-publication offices, from the first paragraph to final, pre-press formatting. Processing words, however, remains the most common productive activity on computers.
No one ever should under-estimate the time and creative energy saved by the (now very simple) ability of software to backspace and retype, mark and block and move it, or copy a whole story or letter or book to another platform.
Email: wandas@post.com
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