Dick Pountain/PC Pro/Idealog 219 07/10/2012
A wave of nostalgia about old-school personal computing is going around the Web, with people restoring, emulating or reminiscing about Sinclair Spectrums, Jupiter Aces, Dragons, Orics and many more, wherever you look. I'm not too proud to jump on a passing bandwagon, so here's my own reminiscence. I bought my first "computer" - a Casio fx-201P, one of the very first programmable calculators - around 1977. It had a 10-digit green fluorescent display and 127 steps of program memory (no editor: make a mistake, enter them all again). I programmed it to check printers' invoices for magazines with varying numbers of pages, sections and amounts of colour, which impressed the printers who had no such assistance themselves, and when in 1979 Dennis Publishing acquired Personal Computer World, it earned me a column called "Calculator Corner" of which this column could be seen as a direct descendant.
That Casio was a fairly chunky beast at 7 x 4 x 1.5 inches and it weighed 13oz, which hardly mattered since it remained on my desk. By the oddest of coincidences my latest "computer", a Google Nexus 7, is around the same size at 7.8 x 4.7 x 0.4 inches and weighs 12oz, though it contains around 128 million times more memory and runs over 100,000 times faster. Oh, and instead of 10 green glowing digits its display shows streaming movies and TV. Had cars advanced at a similar rate then just one could carry the whole population of England to the moon in under two minutes. The German philosopher Hegel famously claimed that sufficient quantitative change leads eventually to qualitative change, and that's what I'm feeling right now about my Nexus, that tablet computers are poised to change the game.
During these years between the Casio and the Nexus I've spent a lot of energy pursuing a particular idea of computing, deeply influenced by Alan Kay's notion of the "Dynabook", his universal portable information store. I've tried and abandoned several drawers-ful of pocketable computing devices, looking for one that would sync transparently to a desktop computer. I've rejected a desktop altogether in favour of a powerful laptop. I'd reached the point, as described in last month's column, where I can use my Android smartphone to share files with my laptop via Dropbox, but it was all still a bit fiddly with data entry via the phone too slow and a screen rather too small for viewing complex websites. Of course I expected a tablet to improve things in both those respects, but I didn't anticipate by quite how much.
Being an Android device the Nexus immediately grabbed all my contacts, calendar and mail from Google's cloud with no effort, and I soon had all my preferred apps (in latest their Jelly Bean versions) installed. On installing File Manager HD I noticed a new menu option called LAN Connection, and despite my acute networkophobia I tapped the Scan icon to see what would happen. After an agonising delay it came back with a connection to "USER-PC", my laptop! It took me a further afternoon of wading through Microsoft's grim network model - what is a Homegroup and how is it different from a Workgroup? - but eventually I got everything I wanted shared. No need to duplicate any music, videos, documents to the tablet, just access them over Wi-Fi.
You have to understand that I work at home where I'm either sitting at my desk upstairs in front of my laptop, or on the sofa downstairs reading books and making notes - now I may have to adopt some vigorous exercise regime to replace all the stair-climbing I no longer need do. I rarely work away from home so the Nexus's lack of 3G isn't critical, and in any case I wouldn't want to pay for another SIM, but then I discovered that the "Tethering & Portable Hotspot" setting of my phone actually works. BT Fon already gives me free Wi-Fi throughout much of London, but where it doesn't I can Google and Wikipede via my phone's Wi-Fi.
So far I've never been even slightly tempted by any of the Home Server or Media PC offerings, but now I'm beginning to see the possibility of a different sort of animal: a tiny Linux box containing a 1TB disk and a Wi-Fi router, with no display or keyboard. All it does is locally store data from PCs, tablets and phones over Wi-Fi, while continually backing itself up to Dropbox or some other cloud service. No shared media streaming, do all that at the client ends (I have Spotify even on my phone). And I've started to feel wallet palpitations of almost Honeyballian intensity whenever I see ads for the Asus Transformer...
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