| Art Botterell |
Getting Past Complexity
| Art Botterell goes back so far he's in front of himself |
This article can be found on
page 59 of the Jan/Feb 1998
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
Take a look at a leaf. A simple thing, isn't it? Now look closely at all its veins and stems. It's actually pretty complicated, right?
Now imagine a dozen leaves tossed on the floor. Think of the complex outline they make. Then see thousands of leaves in a red and gold carpet across an autumn lawn. What could be simpler?
We call them opposites, but "complex" and "simple" are really two sides of the same coin. Simplicity is the unmistakable signature of true sophistication.
When I switched on my first computer it offered me a black screen and a cryptic prompt, then waited while I typed the precise commands that would coax it to action. Today my screen is a cheerful clutter of icons I need only click on to launch programs I couldn't dream of back in `79.
My Pentium has four thousand times the memory of that original Apple II. It has more sophisticated circuits all across the board and runs programs of vast complexity. As a result, using my computer has never been simpler.
Until recently the Internet was a lot like that old Apple II. Only few hard-core users had mastered the cryptic incantations it took get from Point A to Point B across the Net. Nobody called it "surfing" back then.
A better "user interface" changed all that. The point-and-click screen for computers known in the trade as the "graphical user interface" (abbreviated GUI and pronounced "gooey") was developed at Xerox, adopted by Apple, and quickly embraced by Sun and Microsoft. The new generation of computer hardware had power to burn, the logic ran, so why not use some of it to simplify the user's experience?
What a radical departure from traditional data-processing design! Ever since the vacuum tube code-breakers of World War II and let's not forget the rooms full of human "computers," almost all women, who powered the Manhattan Project the sacred goal of every programmer had been to solve the Problem as efficiently as possible. Bigger computers meant bigger Problems, that was all. To divert precious computer cycles from the Problem to provide visual gimcracks for users struck many old-line programmers as folly if not sacrilege.
Had they been a little older they might have recalled the evolution of radio, or at least of television, from cat-whiskers and vernier tuning to digital displays and remote control. At a certain point the leverage starts to shift away from mere performance toward user convenience.
So it was pretty much inevitable that, in 1993, a team of college kids in Illinois would give the Net a GUI. Their original Mosaic web browser was, in effect, "Windows for the Internet." The Internet had been made simple. Four years later, the World Wide Web rivals word processing as the focus of personal computing worldwide.
There's an old story of a theater producer who made anyone with a script idea write it on the back of his business card. "If you can't fit it on my card, you haven't got an idea yet," he'd say. The problem with technologies that seem too complicated isn't that they've gone too far; it's just that they haven't gone far enough yet.
