On Operating Systems
Having actively used computers of varying shapes and sizes for the past 17 years or so (as a casual home user at first, growing into an enthusiast, and now blossoming as a student of the subject itself), I feel a general dissatisfaction with the current state of the art. Something's missing: while people get on with things much as they used to, and more people discover computing every day, something definitely doesn't feel right.
My spark's gone out.
By which I mean not that I intend to give up computers; on the contrary, I've never wanted to dive into them more than at present. On Monday I shall start a year's placement with a small Bristol IT firm, entering "the industry" for the first time. I still enjoy using computers, and I'm looking forward to doing so in a professional capacity (whether or not I'll still be as excited in a year remains to be seen).
However, I no longer feel quite the same passion as I did before. Computers are rapidly becoming mundane, stale, a mere part of the everyday that has long since stopped being novel; like the television, the computer is accepted, and with acceptance comes boredom. If we were to try to explain to 1930s man that many of us would despair of TV because there was nothing to watch, many would think us mad, and yet sometimes sitting here in front of my desk I feel precisely the same way about computing. Something has to be done.
A casual browse of my writeups here on E2 will reveal some definite trends: I write what I know, and I do tend to specialise. RISC OS, the OS that stubbornly refuses to die, is one of them, and it is to that which I intend now to turn for my salvation. When I first started using computers I started on Acorns; now, I plan to buy myself a shiny new StrongARM-equipped RiscPC. I've never had as much simple joy as with using RISC OS, and I say this as I type into a Safari window on Mac OS X, the nearest OS I've found that comes close to the sheer ease of use RISC OS provides.
It's outdated in many areas, it's limited to a small subset of computers, it's evolved surprisingly little since its heyday of the early 90s, but I still adore using it. Perhaps my next writeup shall come from its keyboard?