Eigenmumbles

During the summer after my freshman year, I installed Linux on my computer. It took me a weekend to get things basically running right. I was used to debugging interrupt conflicts and reformatting drives; I was not used to looking up all the information that my X driver wanted. It also took me some time to get the network configuration right, and I learned far more than I wanted to about the contents of the etc directory. I was not careful about backups, mostly since the number of floppy disks involved would have been prohibitive. I lost quite a bit of data.

Fast forward fifteen years, and here I sit with a new computer. I’ve been working on and off setting it up over the course of the day, but most of that time has been spent trying to understand quantum spin while the computer shuffled all my old files from my Time Machine backup into my new home directory, then updated my system software from online sources, and then installed new versions of a bunch of programs – Skype, Firefox, Dropbox, etc – that I wouldn’t have even conceived of fifteen years ago. I never had to debug an interrupt request conflict during the setup. I wouldn’t dream of having to look up the refresh frequency on my monitor. Things just work. And when I don’t understand why something is behaving as it is, I look it up with Google, and that just works.

As grouchy as I sometimes feel about the state of software engineering, days like today make me feel much more optimistic.