iPad: taking computers back from us nerds

Hi, my name is Alex, and I'm a recovering nerd.

I'm hardly as hardcore as some I could name, but I've done my share of tinkering. Fiddling with config.sys on my 286 to free up enough of the 640kb base RAM so I could play Dune 2. Frying a videocard on my 486 (with a bit of stickytape over the inexplicable Turbo button) because even though I remembered to remove the power plug, I'd forgotten to remove the VGA cable. Marveling at the brilliance of a full-color SVGA screen running Windows 95, the hottest of hotnesses.

Now look at me! A dyed-in-the-wool Machead, who cherishes his iPhone above most other worldly possessions and who honestly thinks the iPad will be the bee's knees. I honestly consider the lack of user-replaceable components on my Macs a feature worth praising. I like the fact that iPhone doesn't have a common file store or Flash support despite the inconvenience it entails. Where did I go wrong? When did my Nerd Card expire?

The history of technology shows an epileptic vacillation between the extremes of complexity and simplicity, and between exclusivity and generality. Invent something, add more capabilities, grow frustrated, revise and simplify, add more capabilities to that. Buildings, tools, software. Provide a tool for specialists to multiply their capacity, reinvent and streamline it when it becomes popular among novices.

Where computers were once gritty, exciting diamonds in the rough that took a nerd's enterprising spirit to carve into a gem, they've become ubiquitous and indispensable tools. Modern man carries a tiny, 3G-capable computer in his pocket just as his ancestor carried a utility knife. Everyone needs them.

That computers are complex is an easy thing to admit, but the typical response is to simply shrug and accept it. Language and mathematics are complex and we still need to learn them -- and we'd be the poorer for it if we didn't. Those of us gifted with the experience and insight to understand how computers work well enough to get them to do almost everything we want, or at the very least intelligently compose a Google query to find the solution to our problem, like to think we're the majority and that anyone who doesn't understand computers is a sad throwback. We pity them, and when they're blood relatives, we tolerate them calling us at crazy hours to help them to figure out, once again, how to print a bloody photo.

There's a revolution coming, though, a new conflict between the Nerds and the Dummies, and I'm a staunch turncoat who stands by the principle of being on the winning side.

It started with iPhone, really, in the way that the Galactic Civil War really started with the election of Palpatine to the Senate, but now the iPad takes the throne of the Supreme Chancellor and, well, I hope this Star Wars reference indicates my nerdy pedigree before I turn my back on it.

The players in this battle? On one side, there's the computer users, the folks who know their way around a filesystem, who can install a program and know better than to call their browser 'my Internet'. In the red corner, cloaked in shadow and dusty with neglect, is that slobbering horde of Mongols that have been the bane of Nerdhood since time immemorial: humans.

iPad: Computer users and Neanderthals

Picture Alan Kay. A bright young hairy fellow in the '70s playing in the magical geeky toyland that was the Xerox PARC research center in California. He stood in the midst of the radical advances in virtual reality that we take for granted today: the desktop metaphor.

Graphically-represented files and folders. Buttons you can click. Check boxes, radio buttons, scroll bars that scroll. So ordinary to our eyes, but there were (hairy) guys with flared trousers and exquisitely wood-paneled station-wagons who invented these. Take a moment to think about that, will you? Imagine a world without something as obvious as scroll bars and imagine having to invent it. There's a guy who invented the drop-down menu at Apple. He photographs rocks these days.

All these inventions had the same goal: help people use computers without having to learn them. The approach the PARC hippies took was to create a graphical interface that was a metaphor for a familiar environment. We knew about offices and filing cabinets and folders and desks. Learning to navigate menus was a little more challenging and shortcut keys took a lot of remembering, but made our work much faster.

By the late '90s computers were so ingrained that the desktop metaphor referred to obsolete concepts. The Web, constrained and liberated by a different approach to content and hierarchy, taught us more abstract ways to access and manipulate information. Search the entire internet for a keyword in under a second! E-mail a link to a webpage instead of adding it as an attachment. As more people became computer users they learned these new concepts as well, and soon there was a desktop in every home, just as Bill Gates had so idealistically dreamed.

So why does Apple have to bring out a condescending dumbass even-you-can-do-it kids' toy like iPad? Why doesn't Steve Jobs respect the investments so many millions of us have made to become literate enough to use a device that's a fundamental part of our lives? Does he really think we need that kind of condescension?

He does, and he's right, and I love him for it.

Being a computer user is a hell of a job. Having learned most of what I know about computers when I was young and it was exciting I have a hard time imagining what a challenge it is to learn the concept of a filesystem, but when I taught computer skills to first-year students at the U of A'dam around the turn of the century I also found it hard to find a way to explain it that would reliably register with the intelligent, rational minds that filled the classroom. As late as '05, half of the kids in the first-year classes would be stumped and baffled by the logic of the menu system and the idea that you don't store files 'in Powerpoint' but rather in a folder.

With iPad, all that effort will be for naught. Get this: when you make a document in Pages for iPad, your document will actually be stored inside the application's installation directory -- which you can't browse. You can't control where your document will be saved; it's going to literally be stores in Pages. If you deleted the app before you synced your iPad back to your desktop or laptop, you'd actually lose all the files inside it.

How backwards! Don't we know better? What possible reason can a software developer have for pandering to novices now, after they've finally almost been eradicated?

Because the novices are humans, and the humans might know better than the users.

If the lion's share of novices expects a computer to work this or that way, then maybe that's how they should work. No, there's no maybe about it, that's how they should always have worked.

It doesn't matter if it's an illogical approach or if it requires the computer to perform complex workarounds to suit our intuitive understanding, because we don't owe anything to our tools. We have no obligation to shape our minds and behaviors to the mechanistic vagaries of these devices.