Boy, I really love my odd collection of Amigas. I have an A3000, a few A2000's and a few A4000's, towers and boxes of Amigas. Then you come to making them work.... well since my best buddy died I'm on my own and I get to thinking about adding a USB port so I can DL my digital camera, or maybe connect everybody to my cable modem which is being run by this POS Vaio... but when I go looking for good web sites to explain how the Spectrum or Picasso cards are 'supposed to work' as opposed to what happens when I use them....well I wonder if maybe since you can buy programs to translate Finnish or Spanish or another 101 languages why doesn't somebody produce a program so a non-geek like myself can fathom some of the tech terms that would make all this possible. See, Larry would explain down to the molecular level and with his passing I have to talk to computer people who have no concept of how uneducated I am vis-a-vis computers. i know what i want, I know it's possible, but when somebody kindly links me to a site I find that it's all about a1200's or about UAE or Amiga Forever and ALL of it is so couched in language specific to those with experience in computer hardware and software that I haven't a clue as to what thing to plug in where and what thing to load where. Howcum people with arcane knowlege lack the language skills to translate what is, obviously, fairly simple concepts.
Don't get grumpy, but for instance some things are not obvious to someone who has never done this. Car people have the same problem when explaining fuel injectors vs carburators. Like, install this program... then install this file to this directory and add this line to your startup sequence. Do this to get these numbers and put them there. What I get is explanations so specific to a given piece of hardware that since I do NOT have that specific hardware or software the explanation is useless. And that means my collection of Amigas sit there mostly useless and mostly more money spent than I can afford. I want someone to explain the terms in real-world, non-geek phrases. Like learning to speak Swedish was dirt easy for me. This word means this, this phrase means this and you put them in this order to make sense to a Swede.
Is it too much to ask that as we add technology to the universe we also add a means of translating computer-tech terms into daily words? See, to say that a 'driver' passes instructions to a printer brings to mind a guy with a box handing it off to another guy. But what is actually happening is electrical pulses are produced from magnetic images and passed along a wire to a printer. I'd like non-analog translations. I guess I'd like a better frontal lobe.
But really, for those who have not had that paradigm shift which makes computers transparent they are opaque, and although most of the people are okay with that, even as many people never open the hood of their cars, I would like to know why a computer boots up differently every freaking time it boots?? I was given the impression that they should be consistant. So my 060 Beast running os 3.9 should look the same every time it boots. Except it doesn't, neither does my Vaio, my A2000HD, my A4000 PPC/060 and so forth. It's a contest of wills and I seem to be losing faith. I suppose that's why I like to fire my ceramics with wood. Wood burns the same every time.
Anyway if anyone is thinking about writing a dictionary of tech terms in very simple easy to follow terms with no assumption as to the skill set of the reader, I'd be delighted! sigh. Time to try the A3000 again with yet another hard drive or CPU or whatever else I have around that used to work....
