Computers and Cars

I was talking with my neighbor the other day. He was remarking on how his computer had crashed, his daughters computer had crashed, and other computer crashes. In all of these cases, the machines had been working for years with no problems -- then boom!

I asked him about his daughters computer, being the caring person I am, but she lives in another state -- but no worries, she knows a bunch of computer people who are helping her out.

Then a thought struck me (and probably not a very original one): computers are like 1960 era cars were in the 1960s. The cars back then looked good, had style, but very little in the way of safety features, and broke down from time to time. And back then, everyone knew a mechanic.

Computers today have many of the same qualities. The difference is that today, I know very few mechanics and everyone knows a computer guy or three.

Well, back in the 1960, they weren't worried about safety quite then, more on performance and reliability. And try as they might, no one really got the reliability thing down until the 1990s. That is 30 years! But for the most part, with cars today, you add gas, change the oil, and you are good to go. If something does go wrong you look up a mechanic with a computer and the car tells you what is wrong. Also, cars today are getting better gas mileage. My Suburban gets 18 MPG of all things. That is better than my old Nissan Pathfinder which was a much smaller SUV.

Granted, there is still work to be done. I do know a few mechanics and not many of them are board.

But computers are the same, we have been working on processor speed and hard-drive size that reliability has taken a back seat. Remember, 30% of backups fail to restore. But now today, we have reached our theoretical cpu performance peak, and now we are just adding more CPUs. And that can't go on for too much longer. Also, hard drives are only supposed to last for 5 years, and often last for less. But again, how much bigger can we get in our current size restrictions with our current technology.

There has to be a new push coming, if you think that history repeats itself, where reliability will be pushed. If one hard drive manufacturer could stand out and say their hard drives last for 10 years -- I know people who would buy them, lots of them.

Also is power usage. Energy isn't getting cheaper, and computers are very inefficient with power. Google has an announcement about a new power supply that would save 30% of power costs. I would buy that.

Anyway, computers are still changing rapidly, just like cars are. And trends being as they are, I suspect that will continue. Change is a given, but what is changing is not.