In 1985 I owned an Amiga computer, the first home computer that had real multitasking. Younger folks reading this might not remember the old days when your home PC could only run one program at a time. It was a pain to close your word processor just to start up your spreadsheet. Now we run them all at once without realizing what a technical feat this is.
Today for some reason I remembered all the PC magazines (which were anti-Amiga, since Amiga was the antithesis to Microsoft just like Linux is today) writing pundit piece after pundit piece not just saying that multitasking isn’t needed, but that it is downright bad. “I only have one keyboard!” they would say, or “who can concentrate on more than one thing at a time?”
I was thinking about this today as I was switching between MS-Word, a todo-list organizer, and 2 different brands of web browsers. I wish I had saved all those articles. I’d mail a copy of the stack to each author with a note saying, “I bet you multitask now, huh muthafuckah???”
But then again I wish I saved the memos from AT&T executives telling us that “the internet was a fad” and other myths.
If someone invented a time machine that let me send a note back to myself at any age, it would be a note encouraging me to save all those articles and notes from technology pundits that I disagreed with. It would make an excellent collage.
Which reminds me. This weekend I believe is the MIT Time Travel Conference. The idea is that if they have a regular conference and make it famous enough, eventually time travelers of the future will set their sights on making an appearance. They should know that in the last 24 hours I’ve traveled into the future... about a days worth. No wait, exactly a day!
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