I was in conversation at the end of last week with one of my team, and realised that he (being a bit younger than me) probably didn’t know anyone who tinkered around with cars as a pastime. Well, not at least in the way in which my old chum Steve does – weekend after weekend spent up to his greasy elbows in old VWs, trying to get the things to work.
The reality of modern cars is that they are sealed units. At best, you might be able to buy a USB cable and some software to get into the diagnostics of a modern automobile, but there just aren’t any user-serviceable parts in them these days.
The computing world is entering a similar phase. Back in the 70s, if you wanted a personal computer, you were a) geeky beyond belief and b) going to have to get out your soldering iron to assemble your Altair or Sinclair or whatever. Then came the birth of the assembled computer, and the wave of hobbyist computing (and the time where I learned to program and social network… FidoNet where art thou?…). Commodores, BBCs, Sinclairs, Amstrads, Orics and goodness knows what else.
The devices at this stage were still darn expensive (a BBC Model B was £400 back in the early eighties – that’s about £1,500 in today’s money), and so if something went wrong they were worth repairing. You also customised pretty much into the core of the devices if you wanted them to do something outside of the basics (Disk Operating System ROMs for example). But you could pretty much focus on using them rather than constantly repairing them.
The PC then came along and we started to see the componentisation of computers – rather than getting into the nitty gritty, if something went wrong then you would just replace the faulty component. Customisation moved into just configuration, and in recent years it’s only really the hardcore who would open up a desktop PC case to add or replace anything. Meanwhile, most people have moved to laptops which are generally close to being sealed units, and computing is increasingly moving on to totally sealed mobile devices of one form or another. The costs, all the while, continue to drop as the adoption increases (see handy diagram below).
One of the outcomes of this consumerisation path is that the motivations for the way in which people might engage with IT as a career in the future are probably going to change. As the devices we use get slicker and user experiences abstracted further and further away from the underlying technology, how will people’s interest in the stuff be sparked to actually go get a job in IT? What are the equivalents for today’s kids of our youthful shenanigans of setting up Spectrums and BBC Micros on display in WH Smith to 10 PRINT “BUM!” 20 GOTO 10?
(And is that the only reason why I work in the IT industry, I wonder…)
mmitII 