Emailigent Design
In the Beginning God created the ones and the zeros that there might
be data upon the face of the earth. In this data his subjects found
information and from the firmament of the user partitioned file system
BBN produced electronic mail, that their chosen people might communicate
amongst themselves even though they be not all in the same room at the
same time. And God looked and was well pleased because, by any common
measurement, much information was exchanged.
These early Users were blessed with the opportunity to evolve the
email system to fit their needs and desires. ARPAnet line-oriented
teletypes became Wyser character terminals with random addressing which
made the using of Mail all that much more fulfilling. A few of the
chosen were granted the power to bend mh to their will and thus became
sendmail gurus worshiped by all their bretheren, for it was only then
that Messages could be re-ordered and saved to arbitrary folders, which
was seen to be a great good as they had been fruitful and multiplied
unto the ends of the earth. And, by most common measurements, much
information was shared throughout the globe, all the while using 1200
baud dialup.
But one day a snake slithered through the Parc into the academic grove
of Elm and Pine and up the Apple tree. And that beast did offer the
issue of POP and Eudora a bite of the knowledge of GUI. Thus were MCI
and Compuserv linked to the Internet and HTML, with all its fonts and
sizes in both bold and italic, was injected into email. The Outlook
seemed grim as executives everywhere woke up to find their memos
appearing to be more professionally composed and therefore, imposing.
Yea, though it was at 9600 baud, by most common measurements, the same
amount of useful information was transmitted.
And in this way it came to pass that a great wickedness was loosed
upon the land. The people worshiped the false idols of variable-width
fonts and in-line images and the imagination of their hearts was no
longer pure. Through the Gates of ISDN and 28Kb modems were unleashed
the twin scourges of Spam and Attachments, and thus the chosen people
were driven from the garden of communication delights into the online
world. But even then, by most common measurements, the same amount of
useful information was available, it just required more filtering to
be found.
For now, behold, email was available to all the peoples of the earth
and Word was made manifest and distributed indiscriminately, thus
fulfilling Bloat's adaption of Parkinson's Law of Work: Software
expands to overload available capacity. And the population began to
mock the chosen with photos of their pet rabbits and multi-megabyte
movies of other people's grandchildren. Thus was Plain Text forever
lost amongst the myriad attachments that were forwarded throughout the
net. And so, by most common measurements, about the same amount of
useful information was received using a 100Mbit connection to a 2GHz
Pentium containing 500MB of memory and a disk greater in size than all
of the early adopters combined.
The moral of the story is this: Anyone who believes that a perceived
quality of design is evidence for, or against, the existence of an
Intelligent Designer, has never worked in the Software Industry.
xxx
© 2007 M. Schippling
