I don't remember all the details of the '50s hot-rod movies I've seen, but it doesn't really matter. I know at some point in each — on the night before the big drag race, or when Steve McQueen runs into town to warn people about the latest amorphous cosmic menace — somebody's going to need a car.
And some kid with a greasy "DA" haircut and oil stains on his mechanic's smock whose name is Skip, or Buddy, or Larry will roll out from underneath that '58 Chevy and announce, "How about this baby here? I've been working on her all summer. She's got a 350 V-8 with two performance carburetors, twin overhead cams and a dual racing exhaust. She's fast enough for ya, Steve!"
And I, out in the audience, will nod sternly in silent affirmation that indeed, that must be one fast car; my faith is with Skip, and the hundreds of Buddys and Larrys like him, each another part of the waxed and chrome-plated history of the automobile in the 1950s.
It was exactly this sort of imagery that carried the American automotive industry through its heyday, into the age of the Mustangs and the Camaros, and the high powered Chrysler of the muscle-bound '70s. Then the OPEC crisis hit, and suddenly speed and power were no longer the top considerations for new car purchases. An era came to an end, and with it the phenomenon of the true gearhead car freak, save for collectors seeking to preserve the heritage of previous decades.
There's probably a few of you reading this right now who, despite all appropriate concern for the environment, secretly could never drive an electric car until they found a way to make the engine rumble when you pressed down the accelerator. To you it might seem as though all that's left to do is mourn the loss of the Skips and Buddys of this world. But indulge me when I suggest that the next generation of tinkerers, midnight mechanics and performance fanatics won't be found in garages, but somewhere else entirely. You'll find them in the computer industry.
Sound unlikely? Yet the telltale signs are all there, in the marketing of the personal computer. Bigger, better, faster, more are the words that characterize the changes in the marketplace each year, and everywhere the need for speed seems to be the driving factor. Way back in 1965, Intel cofounder Gordon Moore proposed that computers could double in power and performance every 18 months. "Moore's law," as it came to be called, has held fast ever since — until recently, of course, when new developments in microprocessor manufacturing promise exponential increases.
If you've ever bought a home PC, perhaps you've succumbed to the computing performance mania, yourself. You found enough change under the sofa cushions for that extra gigabyte, or a few more megahertz under the hood. You stand by your conviction that a 64-bit sound card is better than a 32-bit one, and your mouse has three buttons instead of two. You were the first on your block to upgrade to Mac OS 8.1 with HFS+, even though it meant your Norton Utilities wouldn't work any more. You run Windows NT Server on your laptop.
The scene is conspicuously familiar. And that awkward-looking guy, over there, fussing with the 100Base-T hubs in the wiring closet — he's not so hard to recognize either. You can call him Skip. His hair is still on the greasy side, though he's lost some of his sense of style, and there's a coil of cable in his back pocket instead of a 9/16-inch wrench. On the back cover of his favorite magazine, where you might expect to see a Big Daddy Roth cartoon, there's an Absolut vodka ad. But then, you remind yourself, it's a copy of Wired, and not Hot Rod Magazine, that this Skip keeps next to his radio.
Skip's still out there on the front lines, doing his job. He's got the newest hardware, the fastest processor. At home, he's got three PCs and a Unix server, a mini-LAN in his living room. Somehow he's managed to land himself a free Frame Relay Internet feed through one of his contract jobs. He's got a custom CD-R of a prerelease version of Photoshop 6 sent to him by someone in Japan (a trade for a prototype PalmPilot PDA). He speech is seemingly a meaningless jumble of acronyms and technical jargon. Like the kid down the block with the 1970 Plymouth 426 Hemi Cuda, his purpose is to keep you jealous. He waves the checkered flag for all of us, and reflex makes us want to floor the pedal.
Ironically, the fate of the automobile enthusiast may await the computer geek as well. Already, industry is crying, "enough," as rational people begin to realize that they probably don't need a 400MHz workstation to run Microsoft Word. The race for higher performance is being replaced by the race for lower cost, as computer manufacturers gear up to produce sub-$800 budget PCs and network computers. Witness Apple Computer's recently announced iMac, an Internet-geared Macintosh in a sealed plastic case. No Ultra-SCSI boards, no 3-D accelerator hardware can be added to this box. It's practical. The age of the four-door computer is upon us.
I predict that, unique in the annals of industry, the romance of the personal computer will one day sit in museums next to the chronicle of the automobile as one of the great wonders of passionate human ingenuity. On that day, long after the performance fever has died away and the comparisons become moot, we may breathe a small sigh for the loss of the days when the mention of an 80486 processor would be enough to strike a chord of envy in our hearts. But until then, let's enjoy the thrill and the fun of the race, while it lasts. Like in the old days.
Plug in those network cables and boot up, ladies and gentlemen. Let's burn some rubber.
