- Joined
- Jan 2, 2004
This is something like a long story, with a moral, and mostly a rant against the so-called march of technology. I thought it would be interesting to share this with the OCF community because, while we all like to tinker, we also tend to respect what works and not change it if it works fantastically well.
I walked into my local library yesterday. For the longest time, the library catalog system was a central terminal server and a bunch of dumb terminals (the RS-232 serial line kind). These things worked fantastically well--they did exactly what was required of them for doing holds and finding out where books were. The system was based on an ancient version of Unix System V, and the terminals were cool because, if you needed to, you could just escape to the shell and start completely over with a few presses of ^C, if you irrevocably screwed up your session.
I found my beloved dumb ttys gone at the library, replaced with x86 PCs runing Win98 over some sort of ethernet that I don't recognize--probably coax. (This system is apparently brand new.) They've replaced the terminals with a system that you can access over the internet from anywhere in the world.
Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a bad thing--it's the march of progress. The problem is that the PCs that they have running Internet Explorer are about eight years old--they're all P233s. And this is their "new" catalog system.
I figure that it can't be that bad, and I try searching for a book. I type in the subject and press >ENTER<.
It takes thirty seconds to load the page. Thirty seconds. The older dumb terminals spat the results up in about four or five seconds--low overhead, and such. But these pages are heavy on graphics, and the dumb PCs have to load them every time, and so it's slow, and I spend 15 or so minutes looking for the books I want on the catalog before mumbling "the hell with it" and searching out for that section myself, with the old Mark 1 Mod 0 Eyeball.
I suppose the end result of it is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. This can be extended to what we do here. Everyone here likes to tinker--which is great and it's a fun hobby. But this demonstrates a quote-on-quote 'enhancement' that went, in my opinion horribly wrong. The terminals were quick and responsive--sure, they didn't have a mouse or pretty pictures but you didn't need them for what they did! The PCs tend to crap themselves with regularity, and don't load near as fast as the terminals. They now spend a good deal of money and manpower chasing after various issues caused by the PCs.
It comes down to this: If you have a way of doing something that works really really well, and it's fast, painless, easy and cheap, KEEP IT! There is, eventually, a point that you'll tinker or change things so very much that you'll never get any work done--as demonstrated by my local library.
Meh. Kinda applicable here, kinda not. Just felt good to let that all out.
I walked into my local library yesterday. For the longest time, the library catalog system was a central terminal server and a bunch of dumb terminals (the RS-232 serial line kind). These things worked fantastically well--they did exactly what was required of them for doing holds and finding out where books were. The system was based on an ancient version of Unix System V, and the terminals were cool because, if you needed to, you could just escape to the shell and start completely over with a few presses of ^C, if you irrevocably screwed up your session.
I found my beloved dumb ttys gone at the library, replaced with x86 PCs runing Win98 over some sort of ethernet that I don't recognize--probably coax. (This system is apparently brand new.) They've replaced the terminals with a system that you can access over the internet from anywhere in the world.
Ordinarily, this wouldn't be a bad thing--it's the march of progress. The problem is that the PCs that they have running Internet Explorer are about eight years old--they're all P233s. And this is their "new" catalog system.
I figure that it can't be that bad, and I try searching for a book. I type in the subject and press >ENTER<.
It takes thirty seconds to load the page. Thirty seconds. The older dumb terminals spat the results up in about four or five seconds--low overhead, and such. But these pages are heavy on graphics, and the dumb PCs have to load them every time, and so it's slow, and I spend 15 or so minutes looking for the books I want on the catalog before mumbling "the hell with it" and searching out for that section myself, with the old Mark 1 Mod 0 Eyeball.
I suppose the end result of it is, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. This can be extended to what we do here. Everyone here likes to tinker--which is great and it's a fun hobby. But this demonstrates a quote-on-quote 'enhancement' that went, in my opinion horribly wrong. The terminals were quick and responsive--sure, they didn't have a mouse or pretty pictures but you didn't need them for what they did! The PCs tend to crap themselves with regularity, and don't load near as fast as the terminals. They now spend a good deal of money and manpower chasing after various issues caused by the PCs.
It comes down to this: If you have a way of doing something that works really really well, and it's fast, painless, easy and cheap, KEEP IT! There is, eventually, a point that you'll tinker or change things so very much that you'll never get any work done--as demonstrated by my local library.
Meh. Kinda applicable here, kinda not. Just felt good to let that all out.
