Mereja

Personal computing 2020: More and less

Written by

John Gordon

in

OpenDoc was ambitious (emphases mine) ….

OpenDoc was a multi-platform software componentry framework standard for compound documents, inspired by the Xerox Star system …

…The basic idea of OpenDoc was to create small, reusable components, responsible for a specific task, such as text editing, bitmap editing or browsing an FTP server. OpenDoc provided a framework in which these components could run together, and a document format for storing the data created by each component..

… OpenDoc was one of Apple’s earliest experiments with open standards and collaborative development methods with other companies…

… OpenDoc components were invariably large and slow. For instance, opening a simple text editor part would often require 2 megabytes of RAM or more, whereas the same editor written as a standalone application could be as small as 32 KB…

… each part saved its data within Bento (the former name of an OpenDoc compound document file format) in its own internal binary format…

OpenDoc failed of course. It’s easy to say it was ahead of its time, but it may be more correct to say it was a part of a future that will never come.
In recent years even the much more modest Open Document Format seems to be fading away. The modern trend is to simpler user environments with smaller feature sets and fewer user demands. In many ways, we’re returning to the pre-multifinder world of MacOS Classic system 6.
This makes sense. It’s increasingly difficult to live in the modern world without net access, but it’s obvious that the vast majority of humans cannot live in the world of Win 7 or Office 2010 or OS X — much less the virus infested XP boxes in most homes. My best guess is that less than 15% of the American population can keep a single net connected computer running well – much less a family network.
So what will things look like 10 years from now?
Simpler.
This will be hard on us geeks. We aren’t going to get DateBk 6 on our iPhones. We’re going to have get used to a world in which computers are simultaneously more powerful and less capable. We will finally have a single integrated calendar view of personal and work calendars, but those calendaring and information management capabilities will be a shadow of what we once had in Ecco Professional or DateBk and other lost tools of the 80s and 90s.
I really don’t know how the DRM wars will turn out; aggressive Digital Rights Management (copy protection) may ironically sustain the (rogue) classic personal computer.
Progress is funny. I think our computing world will be better and more productive in 10 years, but the geeks among us will have to get used to losing tools and capabilities along the way. We’ll have to … (yech) … be flexible …

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