Small Editorial Section.
PC Prat Magazine
Here, Phundria looks at the profusion of PC Magazines - each claiming to be better and more professional than the next and all padded out with massive advertising splurges.
In our sample magazine the bloat is on the outside! Here, we're lampooning the editorial material inside! That can sometimes be quite hard to find.
Welcome to PC Prat Magazine. In the same way as reading any magazine with the 'Professional' tag makes you a professional, reading this magazine makes you a prat! But you're a special kind of prat, a PC Prat.
In this special first edition of PC Prat, Professor Hubert
Bampot of Glasgow University looks at what makes a PC Prat -
attitude, coolness, you know the sort of thing.
Go to Page 147
Editor Willie Billium investigates the nature of the PC. Right
from the very start, PCs were conceived as little mainframes, with all the
attributes of mainframes - complication, needing a large army of staff to
support them, and ensuring plenty of jobs for the boys - well away from the
corporate downsizing that happens in non-technical departments! That made
sure that they would be accepted, the big computer companies soon made a
mint of money, and Mega$loth® and its founder Bill "What's a
network?" Grates were on their way to world domination.
Go to Page 24
PC Prat Investigators Jill Blipp and Mel Clod
compare the productivity of the earliest PC's with those of today and, guess
what - it's actually gone down over the years! In fact it's lower than it
was in the years before PC's arrived in the office! This proves that PC's
are for prats and this magazine is dedicated to all of you prats out there
who think that PC's are the only computers in the world.
Go to Page 846
Roddy Drott takes a look at the other side - at all these minority
so-called computers that are intended for children and artists. They don't
need much technical support, so they can't be real computers can they? Or
CAN they. If they were we would be real prats
wouldn't we!
Go to Page 1290
The Nature of the PC
Willie Billium
In a word - Grey!
I surveyed a number of PC users in industry what came to mind when 'PC' was mentioned. From the list I gave them, these were the most frequently selected:
- Politically Correct
- Millennium Bug
- Crash
- General Protection Fault
- Hard Disk Full
- Registry Failure
- Sore Eyes
- Upgrades
- Obsolescence
- Repetitive Strain Injury
- Disk Thrashing
- Network Beaconing
- Control/Alt/Delete
When the question "What statement most accurately reflects your situation in relation to home and business computing" was put, a surprisingly large number of respondents selected:
I have to have a PC at work, but I prefer to use my <Acorn/Amiga/Apple/Atari/Psion> at home!
Oh dear.
What Makes a PC Prat?
Professor Hubert Bampot
PC Prats are made by focussing on one type of computer technology, the PC, without regard to the alternatives. To them, the PC is the only solution. More viable and productive solutions using other platforms are summarily dismissed on the grounds of 'incompatibility'.
This attitude, that if it's not a PC it can't solve the problem, is a grave mistake.
PC Prats think of themselves as being 'cool'. Yet the computers they worship run on the world's hottest and most power hungry processors. Strange.
There is a saying that, with increasing numbers of experts in ever more specialised fields, one day there will be an expert who knows absolutely everything about nothing at all! The PC prat is well on the way there.
Is your PC really necessary? You can actually write one or two brief notes by hand in the time that it takes for a PC to boot up!
PCs are often introduced because they are perceived to be the 'accepted' way of improving the productivity of office staff. I note with increasing concern the number of solutions that are offered, usually by the PC Prat type of person, without any indication of the problem that the solution is suppose to solve!
"Don't worry about identifying the problem - here's the solution!" seems to be the underlying philosophy of the PC Prat.
Is it true that bigger solutions solve bigger problems? The PC Prat would say "yes", methinks.
If somebody produced a computer that cost half as much as the typical PC of today, worked twice as fast, was incredibly easy to use, never crashed, and was genuinely popular with its users, what would be the first thing a PC Prat would say?
Is it DOS compatible?
This does happen!
Frankly, we really should be examining the whole issue of PC's in industry using the well established objective techniques of Work Study and O&M. Seriously, I mean it!
PC Productivity
Jill Blipp and Mel Clod
PC Productivity is a myth - did you know that office productivity has actually fallen since the introduction of PCs, not to mention the vast increase in the quantity of paper consumed!
Lower and middle managers, the kind who don't qualify for a secretary, now spend about half an hour a day making decisions and the rest of their time typing on their PCs. No wonder decision making has become a lost art.
Because of the complexity of PC installations, IT departments have grown exponentially, and have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Complication equals jobs.
Once upon a time, in the days before PCs, a clerk or junior manager in a typical office would draft a letter, often in shorthand, then send it for typing. In later years, he might have dictated it, from a scribble, to an audio typist. Only a carbon copy of the original would be filed, along with copies of earlier documents on the same subject.
Now, in the days of the PC, the same clerk, technician or manager, in the same typical office, has to compose the letter complete using, typically, a complex WP or DTP application. Both a paper copy - in order to keep the thread intact, and an electronic copy of the work is retained, and maybe a floppy disk version as well, just to be on the safe side. MADNESS!
Often the people using PCs lack good typing skills, so much of their time is spent doing work for which they are not really fitted, often to the detriment of the work that is the real purpose of their job.
Vast quanities of information are disseminated among ever larger groups of people, so that less and less focus is placed on the work in hand due to 'information overload'. We once saw a tender specification for a fairly simple project, spread over several documents, in a very common Mega$loth® format, that totalled 138MB* in size - no joking! That's right, one hundred and thirty-eight megabytes - BLOAT indeed!
There has always been a problem in organisations, particularly large ones, that by some mysterious process, presentation assumes more importance than the message. As a result, and thanks to the present generation of PC programs, many office clerks, technicians and managers have had to become very proficient in desktop publishing (DTP) and wordprocessing (WP) techniques, so a lot of their time is spent ensuring that their work conforms to whatever the corporate design standards are for their type of communication. They then tend to forget what they're really there for! MORE MADNESS!
Phundria senses that much of the whole PC palaver just might have been a thorough waste of time.
The Other Side - Minority So-called Computers
By Roddy Drott
I've been having an amazing time. Up till now, I didn't realise that some of the non-PC computers are more than just toys.
I was amazed when I saw just how easy to use these minority computers are. In fact, I enjoyed myself so much actually doing things instead of fixing them that I'm converted! I'm moving over to one of them right now, but I don't need to tell you which - they're all better than PCs!
However, you could try these pages:
- Acorn Computers (for Nuts*)
- Apple Computers (for Fruits*)
- Network Computers (for Spiders*)
- Psion Computers (for Psychos*)
* We try to be even-handed with our insults!
Funny, the less letters there are in the name of the computer system, the harder it is to use. No wonder PC Computers (for Prats*) are complex!
