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An article in the Boston Globe today discusses technology headed for the dustbin. I was surprised to see what fond memories I had of these objects. I’m sentimental about floppy diskettes, having spent hours as a kid installing various applications, games, and operating systems (DOS 6 was a dozen 1.44 disks, remember?). I remember the particular whir of the drive, how it sounded like a make-shift paper broom, quickly sweeping the floor. And whenever one spun for long enough, there came the faintest scent of warm, ionized plastic, as if your computer could double as an easy-bake oven.

It’s truly sentimental, I know, but increasingly people have feelings about their technology and companies are attempting to make the technology experience more tactile than cerebral.

The mainframe is long-dead; so too is the XT I built by hand its younger sister, the AT 286, and the super-fast 386 and the unbelievable 486 and so on. I think one wrinkle to Moore’s Law is that while computing speed doubles every 12-18 months, our ability to integrate it into our lives does not. The iPod has been around for nearly 10 years and finally tipped what, 3 years ago?

And that’s just consumer, personal technology. As a hospital CIO friend said, the healthcare industry is at the technology level manufacturing was in the 70’s.

In other words, floppy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 12:12 pm and is filed under technology, healthcare. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.