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It was 10 years ago this month that the Internet became a local call from Salida. Immediately I replaced my $180 Everex 2400-bps internal modem, purchased in 1988 and still more than adequate for my work up to that time, with a $50 14.4-kbps internal modem, since I needed a faster connection for all the wonders of the Internet.
That modem seemed sufficiently speedy for a while, but web pages began to take a long time to load as they got gaudier. So I doubled my speed with a 28.8-kbps modem. The speed problem recurred, so I upgraded to a 56-kbps modem.
Web pages quickly evolved to test my patience. So in
early 2004, we switched to broadband service -- cable from
Bresnan. It was so fast that the Internet worked the way I
had imagined it was supposed to. A year later, we switched
to Qwest barebones
DSL because it cost only half as
much, and seemed about as fast.
So the speed problems have been solved, right?
Of course not. As connection speeds improve, the amount of crap coming your way grows as fast or faster, so that your effective speed may even decline.
Web pages, now teeming with dancing images and noxious sounds, are just part of the load -- one you can work around, to some degree, with the right browser settings.
Email used to be just text and messages arrived quickly. Now, of course, there's spam. But even legitimate messages are junked up with HTML formatting, thus tripling or quadrupling their size, and perfect strangers are fond of attaching immense document and image files.
When we got broadband less than two years ago, I thought
This is wonderful. Now I'll never have to twiddle my
thumbs while waiting for email to download.
I should
have known better. Several times a week I get press
releases with multi-megabyte files attached.
This process -- call it no net speed improvement
-- extends throughout my computing experience. My first
real computer, acquired in 1984, was an Osborne I. It used
5.25-inch floppy disks, and it was certainly no speed
demon. Several minutes elapsed from the time I turned it on
until I was able to start writing in the morning.
The computer I'm using now should be a speed demon -- Linux on a 64-bit processor running at 2 gigahertz with a gigabyte of PC 3200 DRAM, 10,000-rpm SCSI drive, etc. It still takes a few minutes to be ready for work after I turn it on. I don't write any faster than I did 20 years ago on the Osborne. Characters don't appear any faster on the screen. The hard disk is much faster than the floppy -- but it also has to be backed up regularly, and so the net time saving may not be all that much.
The delays are even worse on another computer I use
frequently, a Windows XP machine. Even after it should be
ready to use, its screen is clogged with stuff which
demands to be handled before I can do any work -- some spam
from the Windows Insant Messenger Service
that I
haven't figured out how to turn off, a reminder that I have
only 29 days to register a piece of software and do I want
to do this right now or 30 minutes from now, a notification
that new definitions are available for the anti-virus
program and I should download them immediately lest
something dire happen, an announcement that a networked
drive is unavailable, an insistence from MicroSoft that I
should install some security patch.
The computer industry has something called Moore's
Law,
an observation offered by Gordon Moore, one of the
founders of Intel. It holds that semiconductor density will
double every 18 to 24 months. Higher density means faster
processing and increased storage capacity.
The rest of us work under the Law of Constant Throughput: Any perceived increase in computer processing power, storage capacity or connection speed will be quickly nullified by bloated software and increased data size, so that the user's effective work speed remains constant.
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