RSS feedThere was a time, pretty much before the mid-90s, when portability of computing environments was more prevelant than today. Well, at least until literally today.
In the 1980s, I would travel with a box of 9 x 5.25″ diskettes in my kit bag. Five contained various cracking and copying tools, much of it my own code, two or three would contain a development environment and various assembly source snippets from my home library, and the rest would be a couple of different operating systems, and maybe a recent work in progress. The extra space would be enough for up to three disks if I picked any up in my travels. The beauty of it was you could boot up on anyone’s machine, and it pretty much looked and behaved exactly like your own machine. Portability.
Fast forward to the early to mid-90s, when hard drives really took off. I can’t count how many times I carried my Quantum 105S (105MB) hard drive to user groups, conferences and friends places. Everyone had a SCSI card, so your entire home set up could be carried under your arm and work the same on virtually any other machine. My old 11ms super reliable Q105S made many a journey overseas to U.S. conferences, and is still running.
That was of course before security knew what a hard drive was, which usually made for an interesting experience coming through customs. This was just about the time when switching power supplies started to become standard, which also nicely solved the U.S. 110V vs. Australia 240V problem. Anyone want to buy a couple of my old step down transformers? They’re some of the very few things I have left since L* did her accidental clean out of our back room.
But come Windows 2000 and onwards, the O/S pretty much started binding to the hardware, and because hardware is so variable in the PC market, carrying around drives wasn’t too much of a problem, but carrying around your home boot up drive was. Add the fact that most drives then went internal, and goodbye portability. Sure, we had the old SyQuest 44MB removable cartridge drive, followed by countless Iomega removable devices, but how many people had the drive to use them on?
And then Macs started locking the O/S to the hardware as well, not as bad as Windows, considering the proprietary nature of the machine, but booting on different boxes, while doable, became problematic.
Larry Ellison (what a great photo!), blinkered billionaire buffoon that he is, thought the NC or Net Computer would be the next revolution in computing, not necessarily for portability, but it would at least provide the common platform upon which we could possibly return to real portability of personal content stores that would work on every machine. Although he failed to understand that a single specification for a generic computer would be outdated very quickly indeed, a simple oversight perhaps due to the fact that he’s an idiot. The other failing of the NC was that people want their individuality, which is the whole digital device revolution we’re seeing at the moment. Turning us into a bunch of NC compliant clones probably flies in the face of this. So anyway, after the NC idea failed, he returned yet again to making dollars off the now 27 year old Oracle RDBMS. Although I’m proud to say that it was the 1998 Sydney Hobart Yacht Race that turned Larry off both ocean racing and Australia, all in the same week.
The interesting thing about ol’ blinkered buffoon Ellison, is that he’s also on the Apple board, mostly if not all to do with his friendship with Steve Jobs, and probably little to do with his innovation or clairvoyant skills. Which is why it is becoming more and more obvious that Steve Jobs is really The Guy. I was a doubter when Jobs came back to Apple, but now I’m well and truly for him. Which brings me to…
Goodbye to portability. Until today that is. The new Mac Mini brings us to a new era in portability. No bigger than a large hard back book, or ironically roughly the same as the SyQuest 44MB removable drive, this baby you can take with you anywhere. I know there’s been, and will continue to be a lot of coverage on the Mac Mini, but really, this is what a computer should be. I look at the tower case under my desk for my lowly 333Mhz Windows box, and I laugh, then I look at my various Macs, and while some of the iMacs are fairly luggable, the Mac Mini puts them all to shame.
I could take my Mini to work and use it with my Windows peripherals, I could take it to conferences and guarantee I have everything I need and that it works before demos etc. I could take it to friends places, instead of my firewire drive which doesn’t boot. And more importantly, I can put it on top of my home stereo, or I can put it in my work room, or even take it on holidays.
PC manufacturers never really copied the beauty of the iMac, a single self contained unit, luggable, and if you got one of the later graphite (like mine) or snow models, then they also came in arguably standard computer colours. This time I think it will be different. We’ll start to see smaller Wintel boxes start to appear, but nowhere near as inexpensive as you’d expect. PCs are cheap because the hardware is big, cheap and mass produced, all big problems when trying to copy the Mac Mini.
Like the iPod, after a few iterations we’ll see a fast usable Mac Mini, which gives people an easy way to if not switch from Windows, then at least try it out, and the ability to detach you and your desktop computer from your desktop.
This is what a computer should be, a portable appliance. You can see it in the mobile phone space, the PDA, the tablet PC and MP3/iPod space, technology is finally converging, and this is the first major computer manfacturer to really make the push. Bring it on.
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