Wavey's World - Party Time

Wavey's World By Paul Lara

Carriage or Carrera?

n the early days of transportation, all you needed was a healthy horse, four good spoke wheels, and you were on your way. It was simple back then. The greatest detriment to transportation was getting a wheel stuck in a rut, which could be remedied with the assistance of a few strong neighbors. Then, the steam engine, and then the reciprocating engine came along to 'make it all better for us'. That it did. But it introduced a host of new complications as well. Much is the same with computing.

I'm daily amazed at the diversity of computer users. There are those, like myself, that suffer from 'BBF Disease' (must own the Bigger, Better Faster hardware or software), and then those that have happily plodded along on a 286 system typing perfectly acceptable manuscripts from their DOS window. I got to meet both kinds last week.

I am the video producer for a large hospital in Central Texas. There is a baker's dozen of hard-working, happy employees who work in a wide range of hardware and software configurations. There's the problem. The Hospital's Systems' department had finally grown weary of providing support on outdated computers, and decreed that everyone would eventually meet minimum specs. My boss dropped the digital enchilada in my lap, since I'm the only one who actually reads PC Weekly magazine for relaxation. Finding a palette of mid-level (P166, Win95) systems was the easy part. The hard part was when they were installed.

All hell broke loose. I was overwhelmed with desperate pleas of help from users who had never touched a mouse, and now were facing a foreign screen, using a foreign device, and trying to get their work done in upgraded software. Let's face it, WordPerfect 7 bore no resemblance to WordPerfect 5, which is what many of them had been using faithfully for a decade. A few were grateful to have me patiently point out that there were several benefits to the move, the greatest of which was all of us now sharing network access and linked via e-mail. Some were ticked that they had not been asked if they wanted a new computer, and several were downright resistant to the whole 'paradigm shift thing'.

I caught myself actually telling people it was for their own good. In retrospect, those comments bothered me. Not only was I condescending, but I realize that in several cases, they were perfectly happy AND perfectly productive on their 286 DOS machines. They had adapted to their machines in a nearly organic way, knowing that this particular keystroke produced the perfectly expectable result each time, and here's Wavey, the Flyer Geek, telling them that it does even more, once they decipher what all those buttons mean at the top of the screen. Why should they? It worked, and that's all they cared about. I think too many of us are VendorBait, falling prey to the latest claims that this new software is the One, True Way to digital enlightenment.

My latest amazement came when browsing Corel's help screen on the web, trying to learn something about this new software myself. I read, with sheer amazement that Corel had the audacity to promote their Beta version of Corel OfficeforJava Suite. The amazing thing is that it's all written in Java, making it (in theory, anyway) transportable across most platforms (Amiga excepted). My amazement came when they were touting features such as "…A WYSIWYG wordprocessor with indents, columns and text attributes such as size, bold, italic, superscript and alignments to mention a few features."

What? Hello? These cutting-edge technologies were possible with vanilla processors 12 years ago. But as a BBF-aholic, I'm supposed to marvel that all of this is being performed in a truly cross-platform language. Big DEAL. The horse is laughing, no doubt, that the Porsche Carrera dealer touts the ability to pull itself out of wagon-well ruts using this 'new' technology.

I'm beginning to doubt my own beliefs. I think technology is teetering dangerously on a precipice. The sheer cliff of 'but it's new so it MUST be cool'. Some technologies, such as NewTek's Flyer, truly open a whole new life to us, and hand us the keys to a slick little editing machine that can go from zero to 60 in a blazing 5 seconds. Others, I'm afraid, tout the fact they can even reach 60 at all.

You know, some of my coworkers may just be right. The horse-drawn carriage may have been slower, but it certainly didn't have to worry about getting as many flats along the way.

Paul Lara, owner of VDO Productions, is a Flyer Phreak and jpeg junkie. He's awaiting any graphics job you may have in store at vdo@vvm.com. Do your part to lower the nation's crime rate and keep him busy.