Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 05/89 - checked

May 1989

"What are you on, Banksie? What is it you're taking?"

I was asked that the other day in response to some of the ramblings which have appeared on this page over the last few months. I was inclined to answer, "Phylosan". After all, when you get to my age, that's about all one can manage.

But instead, I made a concerted effort at a coherent reply. "The Greeks have a word for it," I said. That stumped them. They went away to look in the dictionary to see if 'grass' had a Greek derivation. (In fact its Old English, or Old Saxon, or Old Norse, which probably shows that they knew a thing or two in those days.)

In fact the Greek word I was thinking of, or to be more precise was thinking I was thinking of, was 'Henid'. I put it so abstrusely because I have only been told about this word, and can't find it in my dictionaries. I am not even sure of its spelling. But, I am reliably informed that its rough translation is 'whole' as in 'everything all together'.

I first heard the word mentioned in a phrase, 'thinking in henids'. This, as might be supposed, meant thinking of things as an entirety, with all their inter-relationships connected. The specific context of that first reference was to do with the strangely ostracised place of women in our patriarchal society, which demonstrated its meaning quite well.

But it can be applied across the board, especially in our current culture, because it is something we manifestly do not do. It can be applied with particular relevance to technology - and personal computers most specifically.

What we don't have, and what I would most love to see, is what I will now call 'henidical technology', a relationship with the potential benefits of our scientific endeavours that take account of the 'whole', rather than providing some narrow advance which, as often as not, damages more people than it benefits. Another name for the idea might be 'holistic technology'.

The personal computer is quite a good microcosm of what I think I'm referring to with henidical technology. It has used the application of technology to make tremendous processing power available to a wide range of users. Yet, do they need that power, and how often?

At a recent press conference, the boss of a PC company stood up and said "most corporate users want tomorrow's technology today". This may be so. As I have said here before, the corporate market has become riddled with the trappings and demands of 'image'. Being a power user with a gargantuan spreadsheet pouring out of some mega-graphics program in 256 million colours is the bare minimum that a 'real man' can be seen with.

They may want tomorrow's technology today, but most of them still won't be able to use yesterday's technology next week.

Is most of the technology actually required, in a henidical sense? We demand, or so the manufacturers say, ever-more memory, ever bigger disks and ever faster processors. We gloat over having 42 more pixels in a display than some rival user. Yet what is it used for?

Mainly to run ever-grosser applications that are sloppily written and contain vast gobs of code, often called 'increased functionality', which most users will never require. Let me give you a for-instance.

I make no secret of knowing well the author of Brainstorm, one handsome and leonine David Tebbutt of this PCW parish. That doesn't stop me feeling that the program is extremely good, useful and sensible. It sets out to do a job, and does it, henidically, in a tidy 30K.

Tebbo could so easily have done what most other software companies now seem to do - the technological overkill. In would go the mega-graphics sub-system, the comms program and the spreadsheet. Up would go the size to 1.5 MBytes and it would all need a 386-based PC to get it to work at all. Definitely non-henidical.

I can't help but wonder whether we are all being conned by the hype of the computer industry into buying computer systems that we often do not require (and yes, I know that this is tantamount to biting the hand that feeds me). Unfortunately, that hype is essential if the industry is to 'grow' in a way which satisfies those that sit in judgement on its 'performance'.

And this is where the henidical view of technology starts to come clearer. 'Growth' in this context means getting hold of more numbers - money. This is most often needed to satisfy the expectations of City financial whizzos who sit in judgement. But they only sit in judgement on the 'performance' of that set of numbers.

Take IBM, for example. The UK bit recently announced a turnover of £3.874 billion and profits of £512 million. That is a profit of £16 every second of the day, just in this country. However, should the financial whizzos, for their own reasons and purposes, have decided it should have made £17 a second, then IBM would be deemed to have failed.

So the company would get very emotional, and try to persuade us all to buy even more computers, just so it could match City estimates of what its numbers should do next time around.

To do that, more resources would be exploited for a tenuous reason, more toxic chemicals would leach into the ground and the water systems, and more subsistence (and arguably balanced) farmers in so-called third world countries would be turfed off the land to satisfy the demand for minerals.

Most PC users, I am sure, would rarely think of the relationship between their buying the latest 386-based mega-box to run DOS just that teensy bit faster and a starving family in some god-forsaken backwater of a country somewhere else.

If the idea of henidical technology is valid, however, then the relationship exists and we are all equally guilty. I'm not saying we should do away with the personal computer: it is a machine that offers more people power to do more good, both for themselves and others, than virtually anything else we have come up with.

I just feel that we could all think a bit more about the wider implications of our personal relationship with that keyboard and screen.

end