How to act when things go wrong. (...) That alone already takes a bunch of knowledge, and so we treat people who have achieved it like they have understood the thing in question, rather than just having learned how to handle it.
I have felt the difference recently, twice. First, my old computer broke. Something with hard disk, not sure what exactly, but it wouldn’t boot up anymore. So I took the hard disk to a repair shop, and asked them to try salvage whatever is possible and copy it to an external disk.
I am not an expert on these things, but I expected them to do something like connect the disk by a cable to their computer, and run some Linux commands that would read the data from the disk and store it somewhere else. But instead, the guys there just tried to boot up the computer, and yes they confirmed that it wouldn’t work, and… they couldn’t do anything with it. After asking a bit more, my impression was that all they know to do is, basically, reinstall Windows and run some diagnostic and antivirus programs.
Second story, I bought a new smartphone. Then I realized that my contacts and SMS messages from the old one didn’t transfer, because they were stored in the phone or the SIM card, rather than in Google cloud. (I got a new SIM card for the new phone, because it required different size.) There was a smartphone repair shop nearby and I was lazy, so I thought “let’s just pay those guys to extract the messages and contacts from the old phone, and send them to me by an e-mail or something” (I wanted to have a backup on my computer, not just to transfer them to the new phone).
Again, I expected those guys to just connect something to my old phone, or put the SIM card in some machine, and extract the data. And again, it turned out that there was nothing they could do about it. After asking a bit more, I concluded that their business model is basically just replacing broken glass on the phones, or sending them to an authorized service provider if something more serious happens.
The thing that made me angry was realizing that despite what I perceived as deep incompetence, their business models actually make sense. In the spirit of the “80:20” rule, yes, 80% of problems average people have with computers do not require more than reinstalling Windows or maybe just changing some configuration, and 80% of problems average people have with smartphones are broken or scratched glass or battery dead, or something else that requires replacing a piece of hardware. Probably much more than 80%.
So yes, you can teach a bunch of guys how to reinstall Windows or replace a broken glass, and have a profitable repair shop. That is the economically rational thing to do. And yet I miss the old-style repairmen, most of them people from the older generation, who actually understood the things they worked with.
So, let me tell you a story about how I ‘fixed’ my first computer. This was the Ancient Days and that first machine was a Northstar Horizon, based on the S-100 bus and the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. You could take the lid off of the machine and see the circuit boards. Here’s a description from the Wikipedia article:
The computer consists of a thick aluminium chassis separated into left and right compartments with a plywood cover which sat on the top and draped over the left and right sides. (It is one of only a handful of computers to be sold in a wooden cabinet. Later versions featured an all-metal case which met safety standards.[5]) The rear section of the compartment on the right held a linear power supply, including a large transformer and power capacitors, comprising much of the bulk and weight of the system. The empty section in front of the power supply normally housed one or two floppy disk drives, placed on their side so the slots were vertical. The compartment on the left held the S-100 motherboard, rotated so the slots ran left-right. Although a few logic circuits were on the motherboard, primarily for I/O functions, both the processor and the memory resided in separate daughterboards.
The manual that came with the computer had circuit diagrams for the boards.
Now, I knew little or nothing about such things. But my good friend, Rich Fritzon, he lived and breathed computers. He knew a thing or two. So, once I got the machine I turned it over to Rich and he wrote some software for it. The most important piece was a WYSWYG text editor that took advantage of the special associative memory board from Syd Lamb’s company, the name of which escapes me.
Anyhow, I had this beast with me when I spent the summer of 1981 on a NASA project. One day the display went all wonky; the images just didn’t make sense. Well, I knew that the CPU board had a synch (synchronization) chip and, well, those wonky images looked like something that would happen if signals weren’t properly synchronized. I mean, I didn’t actually KNOW anything, I was just guessing based on bits and scraps of things I’d heard and read. Based on this guess I removed the motherboard, located the sync chip in the corresponding diagram, removed the synch chip and reseated it, and then put the board back into the machine. When I turned it on, voilà! problem solved. The display was back.
That’s the first and last time I ever fixed one of my machines. That sort of thing would be utterly impossible with today’s machines.
I have felt the difference recently, twice. First, my old computer broke. Something with hard disk, not sure what exactly, but it wouldn’t boot up anymore. So I took the hard disk to a repair shop, and asked them to try salvage whatever is possible and copy it to an external disk.
I am not an expert on these things, but I expected them to do something like connect the disk by a cable to their computer, and run some Linux commands that would read the data from the disk and store it somewhere else. But instead, the guys there just tried to boot up the computer, and yes they confirmed that it wouldn’t work, and… they couldn’t do anything with it. After asking a bit more, my impression was that all they know to do is, basically, reinstall Windows and run some diagnostic and antivirus programs.
Second story, I bought a new smartphone. Then I realized that my contacts and SMS messages from the old one didn’t transfer, because they were stored in the phone or the SIM card, rather than in Google cloud. (I got a new SIM card for the new phone, because it required different size.) There was a smartphone repair shop nearby and I was lazy, so I thought “let’s just pay those guys to extract the messages and contacts from the old phone, and send them to me by an e-mail or something” (I wanted to have a backup on my computer, not just to transfer them to the new phone).
Again, I expected those guys to just connect something to my old phone, or put the SIM card in some machine, and extract the data. And again, it turned out that there was nothing they could do about it. After asking a bit more, I concluded that their business model is basically just replacing broken glass on the phones, or sending them to an authorized service provider if something more serious happens.
The thing that made me angry was realizing that despite what I perceived as deep incompetence, their business models actually make sense. In the spirit of the “80:20” rule, yes, 80% of problems average people have with computers do not require more than reinstalling Windows or maybe just changing some configuration, and 80% of problems average people have with smartphones are broken or scratched glass or battery dead, or something else that requires replacing a piece of hardware. Probably much more than 80%.
So yes, you can teach a bunch of guys how to reinstall Windows or replace a broken glass, and have a profitable repair shop. That is the economically rational thing to do. And yet I miss the old-style repairmen, most of them people from the older generation, who actually understood the things they worked with.
So, let me tell you a story about how I ‘fixed’ my first computer. This was the Ancient Days and that first machine was a Northstar Horizon, based on the S-100 bus and the Zilog Z80 microprocessor. You could take the lid off of the machine and see the circuit boards. Here’s a description from the Wikipedia article:
The manual that came with the computer had circuit diagrams for the boards.
Now, I knew little or nothing about such things. But my good friend, Rich Fritzon, he lived and breathed computers. He knew a thing or two. So, once I got the machine I turned it over to Rich and he wrote some software for it. The most important piece was a WYSWYG text editor that took advantage of the special associative memory board from Syd Lamb’s company, the name of which escapes me.
Anyhow, I had this beast with me when I spent the summer of 1981 on a NASA project. One day the display went all wonky; the images just didn’t make sense. Well, I knew that the CPU board had a synch (synchronization) chip and, well, those wonky images looked like something that would happen if signals weren’t properly synchronized. I mean, I didn’t actually KNOW anything, I was just guessing based on bits and scraps of things I’d heard and read. Based on this guess I removed the motherboard, located the sync chip in the corresponding diagram, removed the synch chip and reseated it, and then put the board back into the machine. When I turned it on, voilà! problem solved. The display was back.
That’s the first and last time I ever fixed one of my machines. That sort of thing would be utterly impossible with today’s machines.