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From...
New machines, same old stuff
June 26, 1998
Web posted at: 9:30 AM EDT
by Stephen Manes
(IDG) -- Pentium. Pentium Pro. Pentium II. 2 gigs. 4 gigs. 8 gigs. In the warp-speed world of Moore's Law, where chips and storage devices turn twice as fast or grow twice as capacious every 18 months, the implications for obsolescence are downright scary. Today, many programs won't run on the 90-MHz processors that were state-of-the-art three years ago. Three years from now, today's 400-MHz PC will be considered a real snoozer.
But plenty of things in the world of computing still obey one of Newton's laws: A body at rest tends to remain at rest. Such Newtonian items improve not along a fast-rising curve, but in fits and starts. For reasons good and bad, these tenacious bottlenecks tend to survive long past their expected pull date.
A Fistful of Buses
Take the ISA bus, which dates back to the first IBM PC. In an age when everything is getting faster, you might have expected this sluggish interface to have died long ago. Instead, like Ol' Man River, it just keeps rollin' along.
Why? Remember the spaghetti Western, "For a Few Dollars More?" That's the price difference modem and sound card makers face if they switch to PCI. In the era of sub-$1000 PCs, every penny counts. And plenty of folks with ISA cards, particularly in corporate settings, would howl if those slots vanished--even though the ones in modern PCs are often useless because the free IRQ lines they need are unavailable.
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The RS-232 serial port has been around even longer. Improved UART chips have made it faster, but even at 115,200 bits per second it can't always keep up. The serial port has survived solely because of the enormous base of peripherals that attach to it. And in a vicious circle, new devices that use the port continue to arrive because manufacturers can count on finding it in every machine.
The parallel port traces its origins to the days when people bought printers from an innovative company called Centronics. Now, it's the port of choice for scanners and outbound storage devices, despite the fact that most PCs come with only one, which is usually occupied by a printer. You end up with pass-through ports passing through pass-through ports, unless you get a switch box. Either way it's a kludge. But penny-pinching manufacturers rarely offer SCSI as a standard.
Floppy Persistence
Then there's the remarkably resilient floppy disk. Though the 5.25-inch model has gone the way of the rotary phone, the 3.5-inch disk is still going strong. Why? It's cheap and handy for distributing small files, and higher-density formats like SuperDisk and HiFD that can read it should keep it alive a while longer.
What's surprising is how slowly replacements take root in a world where most things move like lightning. Case in point: the Universal Serial Bus. Though it has appeared on practically all desktops since early last year, relatively few USB peripherals exist as yet. FireWire--or IEEE 1394--ports, regarded as an even greater improvement, are virtually invisible. And though observers widely predict that DVD-ROM drives will supplant CD-ROMs later this year, every prognosis about DVD so far has been about as accurate as a Microsoft promise.
Some delays have been blamed on the lack of native support in Windows 95 and the late arrival of its successor. But that's just part of the story. Once a standard is entrenched, it tends to survive unless its replacement offers an easy upgrade path. One thing that got Windows 3.0 going was its ability to run DOS programs in multiple windows, allowing users to upgrade slowly. Chips and hard drives move ahead quickly because they offer improvements without forcing users to give up what they already have. Painless enhancements arrive promptly; others take much, much longer.
But a little enforced stability isn't all bad. Do you really want to buy a new printer every few years just so it'll work with some new high-speed port? So when a pundit spouts off about Moore's Law, don't forget Newton's. Advances in chip technology may be astonishing, but never underestimate the power of inertia.
PC World Contributing Editor Stephen Manes is a columnist for the New York Times and is half of the Digital Duo, a technology program on public television.
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