Another article by Tom Fiske. I believe he’s trying to send a message here!
Forty years ago, I was on the corporate staff of General Electric Company and was living in New York. In order to work for this august part of GE, one had to sign up for a minimum of three years service, so that is what I did. Little did I know I would be on the staff for three years and ten minutes. Loved the job, hated the weather.
In 1970, we were learning to use computers to do our jobs. We would dial up Dartmouth University and insert a telephone into a cradle which would receive the various sounds of our equipment through the telephone and would convert them into zeros and ones that could make their computer boogie. Dartmouth developed BASIC language, which was easy for us to use and teach. We staffers taught GE supervisors in manufacturing how to use computers to speed up their industrial engineering work and make it more accurate. That was my introduction to the use of computers in industry.
Not long after my GE education in computers, I managed to buy a small computer for tasks at home. Of course I wrote my own programs for a while, but eventually purchased a simple program to use for family history. It was an ordinary “database” program that was being used in various forms and for various purposes all over the country.
An accumulation of data led me to purchase a copy of “Horse Thief Directory” (HTD)*, a genealogy program that really contributed a substantial amount of help and accuracy, even though it was not terribly sophisticated in those days. There were other competitors that were also very good, but I stayed with the one product over the years, updating when I could. Three years ago I actually wrote a book using HTD and I published it as well.
Then the unthinkable happened: the motherboard on my computer failed. I had backups at home and on the Internet, so the only thing I lost on the failure was money. It took a while to replace the money, but you can safely bet that I had a new computer in a hurry. It was an HP desktop computer using Vista and a 64-bit internal system. Since it was a couple days before the release of Windows 7, the computer came with a free edition of that new version. I have since installed it. Now I am using Windows 7 with a 64-bit system, 6 gigs of RAM and all sorts of other good stuff.
You know what comes next – several of my applications were not compatible with Windows 7 and 64 bit systems. One of them was “Horse Thief Directory.” I might be able to run it partially with a Vista band-aid patch or a Windows XP emulator that comes with Windows 7. I haven’t tried the emulator yet. But the Vista patch does not allow me to do all that I want to do with the HTD program.
I have just checked the Internet to find the status of HTD with Windows 7 at 64 bits, and I got this message: “Information Coming Soon.”
The message did not say, “A fix is on the way.” No, it said information was on the way. I believe I am at a crossroads. The computer stays. But what about HTD? I like it and am used to it. But is this the year I give it up? I have not decided yet. (I have no relationship with HTD or its affiliates.)
This adventure causes me to see larger issues on the horizon with the state of software, not only for genealogy but for all other kinds of applications. It is this: hardware is improving faster than software. Software producers cannot keep up.
Our computer machines are developing more capacity than our software can use. And, as it often happens in a new industry, the old cannot keep up with the new. The result is that some applications are being lost. Does anyone remember Lotus? It was a database spreadsheet program like MS Excel. It has been gone for years, having quietly slipped away while no one was looking.
What is the future of genealogy programs? If they cost too much to convert to Windows 7, 8, or 9 at 64 bit and 128 bit levels, will they quietly slip away? Unable to predict the future, I can only sense that it depends on the number of users willing to pay for upgrades. Perhaps there are too many varieties of genealogy programs out there already and users will have to unite in order to have any program at all.
You may have noticed that some church groups are doing this. As attendance falls off nationally, they combine, despite some differences in theology, in order to survive. They used to complain about each other, but now they are finding that “majoring on minor” differences has been a luxury all these years.
In genealogy, we may have to begin using a program that combines certain desirable or undesirable features of other programs in order to have any program at all. It is a function of the number of users. Owners of well recognized and well utilized programs may be able to keep up with the newer hardware features. Others will fall by the wayside.
If there are too many new hardware changes, well, there are always the genealogy forms I began using twenty years ago. At least with them I did not get any “Information coming soon” messages.
*Horse Thief Directory (HTD) – An “alias” name for a popular genealogy program, wholly made up by the author.