This is a Windows town
Wednesday Sep 08, 2004
You can't go home again, well not completely anyway. Ten years ago Canada geese were a rare sight in Wisconsin, now they are a plentiful pest. Racine's harbor has less water now, and more zebra mussles. The tractor plant foundry burned down, subdivisions are replacing cornfields, downtown is finally recovering from a rust-belt industrial hangover, and my favorite electronic parts store is now a Spanish Apostolic Pentecostal church. But some things never change...
"May I help you?", The manager of the home office store used a cliche uncommon in Irish retail. I was actually waiting for my wife, but to make conversation I asked for something I really was looking for:
"Do you have a SCSI to USB or SCSI to Firewire converter?"*
I had asked the question at three other retailers whose salesman looked at me as if I had asked for a flux capacitor or a chunk of kryptonite**. But this manager had an answer.
"SCSI? No, is that for a Mac or what?"
"It's for a slide scanner, you know like the Kodak slides?"
"You're not going to find anything like that here. This is a Windows town." He suggested that I try the internet, or Milwaukee.
"Windows town?" I told him that governments and businesses elsewhere are switching to alternatives such as Linux.
"Lie nucks? Wait a minute, do you mean unix or the free operating system?"
"Linux." I told him that Allied Irish Bank, the British health system and the city of Munich adopted linux based IT solutions. (I forgot to mention the Peoples Republic of China.)
"Huh, that reminds me of how the Amiga computer caught on so much in Germany, but never came here. Some of these Linux guys remind me of those Amiga guys."
"It's too bad people in Racine don't have more choices." Lack of competition here in Ireland leads to high prices in everything from real-estate to beer.
"Yeah, If there were anything other than XP I would use it because XP watches everything you do."
I asked him to elaborate, "Really, like what?"
"The other day when Windows crashed it asked me if I wanted to send the information to Microsoft. Heck no! I don't want to tell them that I was being stupid. I was trying to run 5 applications at a time." I reminded him that the Amiga could run more than 5 applications simultaneously on a 7 MHz processor with 1/2 Mb of RAM and assured him that what he was doing was totally reasonable. Modern operating systems shouldn't have any problem coping with a few dozen applications, this JDS box is currently running a few hundred processes for 6 user sessions and it has been up for 17 days.
"Yeah, I guess those computers were pretty good. I have to get back to work now."
I wish I had brought my Morphix-based Java Desktop System demo. It would have been nice to leave him a sample of the future. The old saying "Will it play in Peoria" referred to testing theater productions in a U.S. heartland town a few dozen miles southwest of Racine. Linux counter shows only 25 known linux users in Peoria and 10 in Racine so it may take a while for towns such as these to abandon the monopoly, but it will happen. The forerunner to the automobile was invented in Racine in the early 1870s and later dismantled because it frightened a horse to death. But the horseless carriage eventually came to Racine in a variety of models and brands. Alternatives to Microsoft Windows will eventually play in Peoria, and Racine.
*
SCSI: An interface standard which supports up to 80 Megabytes/Sec, requires only one interrupt for up to 15 devices and often requires less CPU resources than typical IDE configurations. SCSI was used on Apple computers and Sun workstations, it is still used on servers and in performance critical applications (e.g. uncompressed video.) Firewire/IEEE1394 initially supported up to 50 Megabytes/sec, USB 1 supports up to 2 Megabytes/sec. Firewire and USB speeds are usually expressed in Megabits/second rather than Megabytes/second because 400 Megabits/second sounds much more impressive than 50 megabytes/second ;-)
**You can however buy USB and Firewire cables that glow in the dark.
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