Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 03/88 - checked

March 1988

The brain is all a bit of a jangle today. Lots of different ideas and notions are banging around in there, bumping up against one another and not reaching any clear conclusion.

Yes, I know you will say that this is fairly typical, so why am I making such a fuss about it this month?

Well, partly it is because the signals are really quite conflicting, yet I feel they ought to be resolvable into some sort of coherent whole. For example, I get the feeling that there ought to be a direct and obvious connection between the pace of technological development and the apparent fact that many users are 'selling' themselves extremely complex pups that they do not really want.

The only conclusion I come to, however, is one against which some readers have remonstrated with me, namely the apparent suggestibility of the human race. Tell a human it needs something in a suitably convincing way and said human will not only need it but demand it, regardless of the often self-evident fact that it is the last thing on this forsaken earth that they actually require.

Just for the moment, however, let us go back to the other theme for this month, technological development. I have recently had the opportunity to hold in my hand two interesting add-in boards for the PC XT or AT. One comes from the UK company, Gemini, and the other from Definicon in California. Both add Transputer-based processing power coupled to vast gobfulls of memory, all packed into the few square inches of a PC expansion board.

One tends to look at these things and think "......." (well, it is a family magazine). Anyway, one is impressed. Vince Williams, Definicon's founder, put it into perspective with the throw-away line, "what you are holding in your hand is the equivalent of a twentieth of a Cray supercomputer."

At around £4,000 per board, compared to some $25 million for a reasonable Cray supercomputer (without the cost of the plumbing to get the water cooling system fixed up), one can see the awesome potential that is being made available, and work out the relative costs. It is possible to see why boards like this are generating a great deal of interest amongst the cognoscenti of personal computing.

So, we can sit and marvel at the wonders of technology, and make all sorts of assumptions about how, where and when it could be exploited. But the question must then be posed: the cognoscenti might love the technology, us clever-dick pundits will love prognosticating about it, but is it where the users are going? Are they, indeed, shooting off down a blind alley, as often seems to happen?

Two recent occurrences propose the thought that this might be happening. One comes from a conversation, while the other comes from a survey of information technology users.

The conversation was between yours truly and a consultant (yes, yes, consultants know nothing, I am aware of that).

Said consultant, however, was making an interesting point. In his experience (and he'd had a bit, selling PC-based software for a good many years) many customers would not accept a simple solution to their business problems. They would not, for example, accept the fact that actually getting their paperwork systems working properly would be a jolly good starting point.

They would also have grave doubts about obvious solutions to simple communications problems. For example where there was a need for no more than a weekly update on sales and prices between a branch office and HQ, the obvious solution would be to buy the same make of PC for each location and send a disk through the post or by courier once a week. Instead, according to the consultant, the users would complain that such solutions were obviously too simple, and that what they wanted was a 'hi-tech' system with lots of different machines and a fearsomely complicated network operating over leased lines. That, as they say, would do nicely.

In other words, if the users can understand the solution, it can't be hi-tech, and if it isn't hi-tech, then it can't be a good enough solution. I would venture to suggest that the underlying cause of this thought-process can be found in the advertising the computer industry puts out, but others would counter by saying I am once again underestimating the intelligence of the perceivers of such advertising.

I might even have thought that it was just the whingeing of frustrated consultant had it not been for the survey, published by the Kobler Unit at imperial College in London (I do hope nobody will draw a relationship between the unit's name and the veracity of its survey). This showed, in essence, that UK companies investing heavily in information technology are not necessarily gaining any business advantage from the process. in particular, it suggests that they are failing to make effective strategic use of IT, and are not applying sufficient quality control to their investments in the technology. It would not be going too far over the top to say that, maybe, they are not thinking about their investments too carefully. Surely it couldn't be that they are buying gear that is enormously clever, but which they do not understand?

If such a thing were true, then whole sections of British industry (and no doubt industries around the world) are buying up high technology gizmos on the belief that they are extremely clever solutions to something or other. The trouble is, they are not quite sure what that something or other actually is, nor whether the high technology is any good at solving it. all they know is that it must be right, because its high technology, and the adverts say it is the answer.

It all seems rather sad somehow. Here we sit with a technology blooming and growing around us that does have tremendous potential, if used aright. Yet we seem to have rapidly moved into a situation where one word, 'judicious', is rarely found in close relation to some others, such as '...use of technology.'

And so back to the beginning. The Transputer has a great deal going for it, but just think about what might happen if users start demanding it as a solution to whatever it is that they think might corporately ail them. Some users are going to end up with the most comprehensively complicated dog's breakfast the world has ever seen. The worst bit however, is that they are going to be appallingly smug about it.

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