I spent most of Saturday and a significant part of Sunday scraping clean my daughter's computer and reinstalling every bit of software she needed. I had to do this because the machine had gotten infected with spyware so sophisticated that it would not allow me to install or run any anti-spyware applications or even to go to sites offering such tools.
Let's put aside the point that whoever creates this stuff has earned a special place in hell. Or that they could get a real job and get benefits. (Or that I should have had a better firewall.) The thing is, what other appliance in our life works like this?
"Sorry the bagels are cold. The toaster crashed."
"No hot water today. The heater has another virus."
"The fridge went down and all your food was lost."
The fragility of computers -- that is, how this app won't work with that one, or how some bad code can change your search default to Yoog Search (See special place in hell, above) -- are a sign of how we really are enduring the early stages on this stuff.
I was relating the web to the Wild West a few posts back. Let me come up with another analogy for the early 21st Century computer: The Model T.
It wasn't the prettiest car, or the fastest or the most reliable. It was the car that got America on the road, like the affordable PC got us on the info highway. And it came with a couple tools to fix the tires that were expected to go flat and whatever else was likely to break. (I have such a tool set at home, handed down from my father-in-law who remembered using them to fix his Ford.)
That's where we are with computers today. Future generations will look at these drab boxes on our desktops, with their wires and cords and humming fans, as quaint relics of a bygone era. As Model Ts, ugly, unreliable and inefficient -- but world changers all the same.
A PC doesn't come with tools, however. Though maybe a sturdy ball-peen hammer would be a good thing to include in the box. Wait. Strike that. Another of my bad ideas.
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