The terrible twos…
No, this isn’t an essay on parenting. This post is mostly about competing technological standards that seem often to reduce to X v. Y. Remember eight-tracks v. cassettes? Betamax v. VHS? Blue Ray v. regular DVDs? UNIX v. DOS? MacOS v. Windows? Android v. iPhone? All clashes between terrible twos, some still going on. Consider Betamax v. VHS. The first system was clearly better, but the U.S. basically forced the rest of the world to adopt the inferior VHS. In the UNIX v. DOS battle, morphed now into MacOS v. Windows, for those not up-to-date, DOS and Windows always seemed inferior but simpler than UNIX, but maybe Apple + UNIX tilts the scale in the UNIX direction. (I personally liked VAX VMS, but some of you might know what happened to that great OS.) My take: UNIX always seemed a shrine to cutesy nerdiness, and DOS a monument to Microsoft stupidity. That’s just me. You might have a different take, if you bother to care at all.
I won’t touch on the other cases where I’m more an infrequent user and/or never cared enough to go into the pros and cons. I will state my criterion for one member of a techy terrible two winning out over another: it has to be complex enough that any nerd (I once counted myself occasionally in that category) can get down in the weeds and invent clever stuff while the casual user (I’m spending more time in that category with each passing year) can stay in the trees, reaching for the sky, without having to get down into the weeds. With that criterion, no member of any of the terrible twos I listed achieves a passing grade.
Probably many readers of this blog don’t care about the first part of my criterion. These readers never wrote scripts in DOS, DCL, or UNIX, and never will. They won’t have to deal with mountains of data and try to make sense out of them. I respect that. Dirty data is, well, dirty, and I don’t want to shovel the manure anymore either. But, hypothetically, I might be dissatisfied with the inadequacies of a little app on my Win 8.1 laptop and want to tweak it a wee bit. For a guy who wrote machine code for his Color Computer because its trig functions were too slow (slower than even the calculators back in the day), that could be frustrating. Never mind that the only app I use is a weather app, which seems to work fine. (I’m in the process of figuring out how to get rid of most of them!)
I’m on the road to becoming a technical savage too. I have a general idea about what goes into an app, but I’d rather write a new Chen and Castilblanco novel standing on my head than dig farther into how the damn things work. Moreover, I just know that my Win 8.1 app is different from an app on an iPhone is different from an app on an Android phone, and so forth. I guess that’s one advantage of the terrible twos. You can flip a coin and choose one—there are only two choices.
Why that happens is beyond me. Maybe it’s because so many technological products are made in China—that old yin and yang thing, you know. We don’t have yok, yin, and yang (no, I don’t know what yok means in Chinese, so don’t ask). Black and white, although we now know there are fifty shades of gray. Or, maybe it’s just human nature—people can’t handle having more than two choices. Or, maybe people are becoming binary—the war of the machines against human beings might never happen because we’re already becoming machines!
Having two or more choices is, of course, user unfriendly. It’s against having standards. The IEEE struggles all the time with them for high tech equipment. Some corporation (usually Apple) comes along and sets a standard on its head. No one enforces standards either, so users generally have to sit back and watch, hoping that someone comes to their senses, but it’s becoming more difficult. Technological progress moves so fast that standards, patents, and court cases can’t keep up. I sit back and watch, having a good old time reading the debates between adherents to one side or the other of a terrible two.
Here’s some more terrible twos: cable v. FIOS, metric v. English, cell phones v. land lines, stick shift v. automatic, gas engines v. electric, Kindle v. Nook, and so forth. And don’t think the terrible twos are specific to technology. Here’s some more: male v. female, reality TV v. real TV, nature v. nurture, classical music v. pop music, fiction v. non-fiction, Catholic v. Protestant, Red Sox v. Yankees, pbooks v. ebooks, Amazon v. Hachette, Dems v. GOP, conservatives v. progressives. You can go on and on. Why do these choices come in pairs? In most cases, you can list pros and cons about each member of a pair, and therein lies the debate.
If we had three arms and legs and three fingers and toes on each hand and foot, three eyes, three sexes, three seasons, and so forth, would I be writing about the terrible threesomes? Dunno. I hope there’s a PhD student out there looking for a thesis topic who will answer this burning question. That’s probably more important than writing a UNIX script, but who knows? Maybe no one else is worried about it as they head off to visit their favorite barista. Coffee…or tea?
And so it goes….
