Douglas Adams - The Salmon of Doubt - Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

Now, this raises some interesting questions. (Well, interesting to me. You can please yourselves.) What about this input business, then? I am, of course, as out of my mind with excitement as the next person about the prospect of voice input and pen input, but you know and I know, and anybody who has fooled around with a Caere Typist or the like will know that things rarely work as smoothly in practice as they do in theory, or at least not yet. Most of the time spent wrestling with technologies that don’t quite work yet is just not worth the effort for end users, however much fun it is for nerds like us. The days when you can say, “Open pod bay number 2, Hal,” and be confident that Hal understands that you want to be stranded on the outskirts of Jupiter are still a way away. And I suspect that it will be a very long time before I am able to dictate an article like this and for the result to be even decipherable, let alone accurate. We’ve all seen the old sketch in which a secretary writes down absolutely everything the boss says, including the bit where he says, “Don’t write this bit down,” or “Cross out that last sentence.” I think there’s going to be a lot of stupid-secretary-type grief to go through before we get it working smoothly. As for pen input devices, well, as I said above, ten years of word processing has meant that my handwriting has deteriorated to the point where even I can’t read it, so what chance a computer stands I really don’t know. Can I be bothered to tease out the irony involved in all that? No. So for the moment that leaves us back with the keyboard input, and keyboard input, for the moment, means qwerty. But qwerty, as we know, was originally designed to slow down typists so the keys wouldn’t jam.

It’s deliberately inefficient. However, all attempts to replace it with something more efficient, like the Dvorak keyboard, have failed. People know qwerty already, and they don’t have any pressing incentive to change. Dvorak et al. may be better, but qwerty is, or has been till now, good enough. “If it ain’t busted, don’t fix it” is a very sound principle and remains so despite the fact that I have slavishly ignored it all my life.

I think, though, that we might finally have arrived at point at which there is a strong incentive to reinvent the keyboard. Palmtop computers are where all the new action is. Apple and Microsoft and everybody are suddenly beginning to get revved up about personal digital assistants and stuff, and, having been using this Psion Series 3a for a few hours now, so am I. It’s terrific technology, and this is just the beginning of that crucial moment at which something stops being just an entertaining new toy and starts being something you can seriously use in the bath. We’ve all known for years that qwerty isn’t good. I think we’ve now got to that important point where it isn’t even good enough. The point where it isn’t even good enough. (Yes, this is exact copy typing!) I hope that systems designers have not been put off by the failure of the Dvorak keyboard. I hope they are carefully studying the way that people hold palmtop computers, where their fingers naturally fall and fit and how the whole idea of how a keyboard works can be rethought. I would very much like it if my thumb joints were not now stiff and aching. I’ve proved it can be done, but, like Branwell Bronte, I’m not expecting to do the same trick again tomorrow.

We notice things that don’t work. We don’t notice things that do. We notice computers, we don’t notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don’t notice books.

Little Dongly Things Time to declare war, I think, on little dongly things. More of them turned up in the post this morning. I’d ordered a new optical disk drive from an American mail-order company and, because I live in that strange and remote place called “Foreign,” and also because I travel like a pigeon, I was keen to know, when ordering it, if it had an international power supply.

An international power supply is the device that means it doesn’t matter what country you’re in, or even if you know what country you’re in (more of a problem than you might suspect)—you just plug your Mac in and it figures it out for itself. We call this principle Plug and Play. Or at least Microsoft calls it that because it hasn’t got it yet. In the Mac world we’ve had it for so long we didn’t even think of giving it a name. Nowadays a lot of peripherals come with international power supplies as well—but not all. Which is why I asked. “Yes, it does,” said Scott, the sales assistant.

“You’re sure it has an international power supply?”

“Yes,” repeated Scott. “It has an international power supply.”

“Absolutely sure?”

“Yes.”

This morning it arrived. The first thing I noticed was that it didn’t have an international power supply.

Instead it had a little dongly thing. I have rooms full of little dongly things and don’t want any more. Half the little dongly things I’ve got, I don’t even know what gizmo they’re for. More importantly, half the gizmos I’ve got, I don’t know where their little dongly thing is. Most annoyingly, an awful lot of the little dongly things, including the one that arrived this morning, are little dongly things that run on 120-volt AC—American voltage, which means I can’t use them here in Foreign (state code FN), but I have to keep them in case I ever take the gizmo to which they fit—provided I know which gizmo it is they fit to—to the U.S.A.

What, you may ask, the hell am I talking about?

The little dongly things I am concerned with (and they are by no means the only species of little dongly things with which the microelectronics world is infested) are the external power adapters that laptops and palmtops and external drives and cassette recorders and telephone answering machines and powered speakers and other incredibly necessary gizmos need to step down the AC supply from either 120 volts or 240 volts to 6 volts DC. Or 4.5 volts DC. Or 9 volts DC. Or 12 volts DC. At 500 milliamps. Or 300 milliamps. Or 1,200 milliamps. They have positive tips and negative sleeves on their plugs, unless they are the type that has negative tips and positive sleeves. By the time you multiply all these different variables together, you end up with a fairly major industry that exists, so far as I can tell, to fill my cupboards with little dongly things, none which I can ever positively identify without playing gizmo-pelmanism. The usual method of finding a little dongly thing that actually matches a gizmo I want to use is to go and buy another one, at a price that can physically drive the air from your body.

Another possible reason is that it is sheer blinding idiocy. It couldn’t possibly be that, could it? I mean, could it? It’s hard to imagine that some of the mightiest brains on the planet, fueled by some of the finest pizza that money can buy, haven’t at some point thought, “Wouldn’t it be easier if we all just standardised on one type of DC power supply?” Now, I’m not an electrical engineer, so I may be asking for the impossible. Maybe it is a sine qua non of the way in which a given optical drive or CD Walkman works that it has to draw 600 milliamps rather than 500, or have its negative terminal on the tip rather than the sleeve, and that it will either whine or fry itself if presented with anything faintly different. But I strongly suspect that if you stuck a hardware engineer in a locked room for a couple of days and taunted him with the smell of pepperoni, he’d probably be able to think of a way of making whatever gizmo (maybe even the new gizmo Pro, which I’ve heard such good things about) he’s designing work to a standard DC

low-power supply.

In fact there already is a kind of rough standard, but it’s rather an odd one. Not many people actually smoke in their cars these days, and the aperture in the dashboard that used to hold the cigar lighter is now more likely to be powering a mobile phone, CD player, fax machine, or, according to a recent and highly improbable TV commercial, an instant coffee-making gizmo. Because the socket originally had a different purpose, it’s the wrong size and in the wrong place for what we now want to do with it, so perhaps it’s time to start adapting it for its new job.