Amiga

6. About the holy shrines, the revolution and a guy named Collas

This message was originally addressed to ALL
by jvan006@cs.auckland.ac.nz in comp.sys.amiga.misc

and was forwarded to you by KTDETLIE

Jim Collas said he liked it, that it was his vision
too, and couldn't have said it better himself.

-----------------------------------

[ WARNING! Long incoherent drivel by raving luny ahead :-) ]

Take your eyes off the screen for a moment, and look around. What do you see? I can make a pretty good guess at what you're seeing. You're sitting at a desk, dominated by a screen, keyboard, and mouse. A computer is either standing on the floor beneath the desk. If it's standing on top of the desk, it's do your electronic finances, whatever; this is where you go. Rituals are performed here. With the correct incantations, and sufficient sacrifice, you can gain strength, power, and knowledge. It's a holy place, with the computer as it's altar.

Once upon a time, the holy places were larger. There were less of them. Priests would silently roam through the holy places, receiving the prayers of a chosen flock, providing blessings for the good, handing down punishment for the sinners. The holy places I speak of are of course the Data and Computer Centres. As the chosen flock grew in size, their demands grew larger. No longer did they wish to come to the Data Centres. No longer did they want to wait overnight for blessing or punishment. And the gods listened. And the revolution came. "Behold! The personal altar! (also available in kitset form)". The chosen flock no longer needed to be chosen. The flock grew to be the masses. And the masses constructed their own shrines in which they placed their own altars.

The priests were banished. Guidance and knowledge were there for all, available in your own home. As the altars advanced in design, cryptic prayers were replaced by simple phrases. And the masses saw it was good. However, a few became discontent. Taught by the original chosenflock, or even of the chosen flock themselves, they had powerful visions. They are the wise ones.As the masses grew, the altars became an ever greater part of everyday life. Some of the masses would spend hours, even days in solitary confinement to their holy shrines in order to gain knowledge and contentment. These are the religious fundamentalists. Many a tabbed the gloomy darkness. The masses looked up. Blinking their eyes, they stepped into the world and rejoiced, for they were freed.

But some of the fundamentalists looked upon the new altars and deemed them unholy, for they were scared to leave their shrines. "These new altars are not holy. How could we possibly allow them to replace our old, holy altars? This is not salvation, it is madness!", they chanted. But in secret, they feared not the altars, but freedom. The conversion of their holy shrines into mere rooms of darkness,gargoyles, and dust, filled them with dread. "What is the altar without the shrine?", they asked. "Freedom and harmony", exclaimed the masses. But they were not believed.

And so the shrines remained. As the years passed by, the shrines started to slowly crumble into dust. Sometime the enlightened masses would come and visit the shrines to show their children, as a parent would bring a child to a museum to look at the tools of a longlost primitive civilization. They would find an old, dirty looking man, growling at them about sinners, heathens, and some guy called Collas. No one knew what the hermit did in his lair. No one could think of why he chose this self-imposed exile, this prison. No one noticed when the last of the shrines collapsed into rubble.

What I'm getting at is this: the next computer revolution is not about cool hardware. It's about where you can access computer services. Just like PCs took those services out of data centres and onto people's desktops, this revolution will take computer services out of their dedicated personal shrines and make them pervasively available our laptop to your PC requires significant physical effort (putting laptop next to computer, plugging in cables or using sneakernet). To get information back to the laptop, the whole process has to be repeated. After the revolution, your home computer, your laptop, your PDA, will all be able to access your own piece ofinformation space in the virtual world from anywhere in the real world. So how is Amiga positioning themselves for this revolution?

The approach appears two fold: hardware infrastructure, and software infrastructure. On the hardware side, computer home hubs (or whatever these things are going to be called) are going to be big business. As big as selling stereos and videos. The departure from an altar in a shrine to a piece of metal and plastic sitting in the corner isn't going to be abrupt. People's mindset has to be changed. Amiga are positioning themselability, and accessibility, in a uniform environment. This is Amiga OE and AmigaObjects. This too, on its own, is not the revolution.

Putting the hardware and software together is not the revolution. The revolution is a fundamental change in how we think about computing and computers. Amiga are providing us, and the rest of the world, with the tools that allow this change to happen. The revolution is what people are going to do with the tools. You, me, Collas, everyone else at Amiga. We are the revolutionaries. Open the doors, break down the barriers, release the chains, join the world. Computing will no longer be a sacred place of pilgrimage, a holy altar locked up in a shrine. It will be anywhere you are. This is the revolution.

---JvdL---

(who is amazed anyone read this far!)