Technological Roundabout

I was flicking through a copy of .Net magazine and the "Web Builder" section had a feature on Flash and came with some examples to type into your Flash editor to learn some new Flash skills. This sent me on a voyage of nostalgia of halcoyn days long gone spent trashing away at a BBC Micro keyboard typing in a 500 line program from a computer magazine. This was before the hard drive, before the CD-Rom, before the floppy disk and just before cassette decks made portable storage possible.

It then struck me that we’re never really moving forward in terms of how we work. Whilst you now find magazine games on a CD-Rom stuck to the cover, they still list program code for Flash projects, HTML and javascript. So while technology has advanced, the way we work really hasn’t.

Let’s look at the web. It’s 1999 and 56k modems are super-fast at downloading text but images are still slow. We optimize the images to within an inch of their life to make them smaller. We all whimsically dream of a better life, of broadband and of never waiting for a 40k image to load.
Fast forward five years and even though a large proportion of the western world has a broadband connection, we’re still optimizing. Why? For those trendy PDA and mobile phone users who wish to browse the web from the airport, train station or car. We’re almost back to square one in creating different versions of our websites to enable quick loading on these memory frugal and costly devices.

In five years time when the average PDA and mobile phone has a speedy connection and bags of memory, we’ll still be optimizing for internet watches and we’ll still be typing in code for some low level programming language.

Round and round we go.