An historic technological paradigm shift

Chris Anderson looks at the paradigm shift that led to the embracing of "waste", and in turn, to our modern world:

Don't blame Honeywell — blame the computing world of the 1960s. In those days, computers were expensive mainframes. Because processing power was so scarce and valuable, it was reserved for use by IT professionals, mostly working for big companies and the government. Engineers both built the computers and decided how to use them — no wonder they couldn't think of nonengineering applications.

But as the Kitchen Computer hinted, computers would soon get smaller and cheaper. This would take them out of the glass boxes of the mainframe world — and away from the IT establishment — and put them in the hands of consumers. And the real transformation would come when those regular folks found new ways to use computers, revealing their true potential.

All this was possible because Alan Kay, an engineer at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, understood what Moore's law was doing to the cost of computing. He decided to do what writer George Gilder calls "wasting transistors." Rather than reserve computing power for core information processing, Kay used outrageous amounts of it for frivolous stuff like drawing cartoons on the screen. Those cartoons — icons, windows, pointers, and animations — became the graphical user interface and eventually the Mac. By 1970s IT standards, Kay had "wasted" computing power. But in doing so he made computers simple enough for all of us to use. And then we changed the world by finding applications for them that the technologists had never dreamed of.

Once upon a time, programs would be praised for their 'elegance' . . . that is doing something in the least possible number of instructions. Programs were, by modern standards, incredibly tiny. And, as a direct result, restricted to the expert users who could put them together in ways that did useful things. To the early computer users, we are incredibly wasteful in our abundance . . . but, as Chris Anderson points out, it was the deliberate "waste" which has led to the abundance we now enjoy.

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