My Computer

I tried in vain to explain just how awful, in a technical sense, Windows95 was, and where the OS was making things difficult rather than it being the users that just didn't understand. I tried explaining how the Windows Explorer was single-threaded, and this made things feel very like Windows 3.1 at times. I said to see this, copy a sizeable file to a floppy disk using the desktop, and watch the desktop become unresponsive. I would say just right-click on the file and choose "send to", then pick the floppy disk. That's when they would interrupt with, "you can copy stuff to the floppy disk that way? Cool!" I had to admit that the "send to" feature was a handy thing, but I could not convey how limiting the single-threaded explorer was. In OS/2, I could have done multiple drag-drop operations with the same window to re-arrange files without having to wait for the file moves to finish because they went on in the background. The other problem was that DOS/Windows users had been conditioned that copying things to disk was just something you had to wait until it was complete. Even when they had the ability to do other things while copying to a disk in Windows NT, they treated it as a critical operation, and would not task the machine to do anything else in case it "messed up" the copy operation. This explains why they completely accept not using their computer at all while burning a CD. After all, doing anything else might indeed screw things up under Windows, and you were missing the point: the mere fact they were able copy a CD was so amazing that having to do nothing until the process was complete was not a problem to them. This philosophy extended to the computer in general. Windows users also accepted crashes since that had become the norm. No one felt they could do anything about it, but it didn't really matter since everyone else was in the same boat, they could all commiserate and that made things okay.

People like me knew that there wasn't some fundamental law of the universe that meant the computer could only do one thing at a time and that humans had to wait for the machine. What rubbish. The problem seemed to be not that it was technically impossible or hard, but that most consumers didn't know to demand it. At every turn, they would just sigh and bend to the will of the machine. It seemed to be partly because computers were rather complicated, and people just didn't want to bother with all those details to get stuff done more efficiently. Telling them that it was possible to do these things, but you had to use Unix was not an option.

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