Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Same song, “x” is replaced by something else. It is called “software compatibility.”

A little history in the field of computing. In the beginning, the dominant cost was hardware. Two or three programmers could occupy the most expensive computer in the world. The computer cost a million times more than the programmer’s annual salary.

Sometime in the 1970s or so, this flipped. The dominant cost  was the programmer’s salary, i.e., software. Let’s see…today I can hire a programmer for $50,000 a year in a low cost of living area of America. A powerful computer costs $1,000. Hmmm.

So here we are, software is the dominant cost factor. When you write software, you want it to run on as many computers as possible.

Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the computing platform that had the most users and the most computers was DOS (disk operating system) from Microsoft. There was some joke going around that if someone built a supercomputer that was a million times more powerful than state-of-the-art and fit in your pocket, someone would ask, “but is it DOS-compatible?”

Now we have such a computer (almost) that fits in my pocket. It runs iOS. Notice how we changed the uppercase “D” to a lowercase “i.” (And I still don’t know what that “i” means!) We can change the joke to be a new supercomputer than fits in the frame of my eyeglasses. Someone will ask, “but is it iOS-compatible?”

It is the same old story. Software is the dominant cost in computing. Software must be compatible with the most popular computing platform on the planet.