Despite the endless pressure to install the latest and greatest, many of the core technologies which are in use in the modern enterprise have been around for decades, if not centuries.
Our culture of newness means that people are embarrassed by "retro" technology. Nobody boasts that they've used the same fax machine for the past 20 years, or how Windows 3.1 still suits them just fine. (OK, we admit it, Slashdot types get a kick out of emulating ancient operating systems on their new PCs. But noone suggests that there's serious business value in doing so, and the very same people are the ones who are itching to rebuild their Linux kernel every time the wind changes direction.)
Innovation and freshness have become so entrenched as desirable business values that confessing you use older equipment is often viewed as tantamount to an admission of failure. Even with severe pressures on IT budgets, few people would come right out and suggest that we stop seeking newer, better ways of doing things.
Yet a quick glance at your own desk will confirm just how entrenched relatively ancient technologies are. The chances are that the PC before you is still running sections of operating system code which are more than 20 years old, displaying the results on a screen which is little different to those available a decade ago, and using a keyboard layout which was first thought up more than a century ago. You've probably still got an in-tray containing faxes, the concept of which dates back more than 150 years, and no electronic technology has yet proven itself a sensible replacement for the humble pen (the jury is still out on the tablet PC), which in one form or another has been with us for millennia.
Realising this can be quite a shock, but understanding why older technologies continue to thrive despite our relentless pursuit of the next big thing can help you understand where the real value in those technologies lies. It can also equip you to identify the crucial difference between systems that are out-of-date but functional, and systems which are actually costing you because of their age. So let's take a tour of some of the ancient systems littering your enterprise.
On the desktop
Operating systems
When Microsoft launched Windows 95 eight years ago, one of the big selling points was that it was the first Windows system to be natively 32-bit. Yet despite that shift, the software giant also went out of its way to ensure that much older DOS applications would continue to function. This wasn't ridiculously difficult, since so much of Windows was in fact just window dressing on top of a DOS shell which still firmly reflected its roots in 1981. It also reflected a market reality that Microsoft has long acknowledged: if you force people to upgrade their applications every time they upgrade their operating system, some of them will simply stop upgrading their operating system. This is rarely good for revenue.
Of course, Microsoft no longer guarantees that such ancient applications will work, and each Windows release from 1995 onwards has issued more and more dire warnings whenever you try while making the DOS prompt more and more obscure--but it is still there, and such applications will mostly work if you need them. (In fact, Microsoft has taken this process of nagging so far that many of the newest drivers from its partner companies get flagged by Windows XP for not being certified, but that's another story.)
Not everyone runs Windows, of course, but that doesn't necessarily make them any more advanced. Unix and its various derivatives (including Linux and Mac OS X) proudly acknowledge their heritage in decades-old operating systems, and indeed boast about this as one of the core factors in their reliability. The bottom line? No matter what OS you choose to use on the desktop, its historical heritage is likely to be at least as important as its future potential. That's not to underestimate the importance of some of the changes that have taken place--IP arriving in Windows, for instance--but you do need to keep a sense of perspective.
CRT displays
If you read through a PC magazine, or indeed a men's or business magazine, you could be forgiven for assuming that we were living in a world dominated by plasma screens. There's no denying that lightweight, low-powered, high-resolution flat screens (whether plasma or LCD) are indeed sexy. There's also no denying that relatively few people have them on their desktops, especially in business environments.
| “No doubt, VOIP is the future but so is death—and you don’t see anyone hyping that.” |
There are definite limits to this approach, though. As well as consuming more space, some older monitors may put out higher levels of radiation than are currently deemed acceptable, and many don't support advanced power-saving features. There's no reason to make your staff suffer by using a green-screen monitor, but the business case for everyone going flat screen simply hasn't emerged yet (and probably won't until several years after they become the standard option supplied with every PC, when basic apathy will again take over).
Keyboards
Save for the absence of control and function keys and a USB connector, there is scarily little difference between the keyboard you'll plug into a modern PC and that found on any typewriter from the past century. This is perhaps the ultimate example of training-based inertia.
The original QWERTY keyboard layout was designed not for efficiency, but for inefficiency; with a more logical layout, typists could attain speeds that were so high that old-fashioned hammer-style typewriters became hopelessly jammed. The need to jump all over the keyboard imposed by QWERTY eliminated this problem. (The French, of course, needed the differing AZERTY layout because the letter Q is more common in typical discourse.)
In the computer era, any keyboard should be able to keep pace with the fastest of typists (although some of the fold-out models designed for use with PDAs still have their moments). Nonetheless, QWERTY is now so firmly established as a de facto standard that nobody has ever been able to make serious inroads with more sensible keyboard layouts such as Dvorak.
Although companies with a concern for ergonomics may have updated their keyboards to minimise the risk of repetitive strain injury, there's been virtually no other change in this field.
While nirvana for many interface designers would be to eliminate keyboards in favour of other technologies such as pen or voice input, the flat reception to date for the tablet PC concept suggests that there's quite a way to travel on this front. And just as poorly-designed keyboards have survived most attempts so far to update them, they may well survive the challenge of voice and pen as well.
Processors
If you went to your PC supplier and tried to purchase a system based on the 386 processor, you'd be laughed right out of the supply chain. Modern processor technology now has such a high turnover rate that PC models rarely stay on the market for more than six months.
However, if you also do some digging, you may well find a staff member still using a 386--and if their demands don't extend much beyond checking their e-mail and producing the occasional document, that's unlikely to be a problem.
Notably, the fact that you can't buy a PC based on the 386 doesn't mean that Intel isn't still producing those processors for use in other applications. Older processors are frequently embedded in everything from toys to refrigerators.
In fact, the economics of building processor plants demand that they can stay in operation for several years. But don't expect your PC vendor to acknowledge this. (Indeed, Intel itself declined to discuss its embedded processor strategy for this story.)
