Title: The Wall

Dear Francis,

Thank you for your thought-provoking article in the May C Vu where you draw an analogy between buying a car and buying a computer.

The analogy is interesting but I think it may be slightly weak. I think you are comparing the user interface of the car with the internal architecture of the computer, and I don't think this is a fair comparison. If instead you draw the analogy between the user interface of the car and the user interface of the personal computer I think the computer would still lose, but not by so much as you suggest. When buying the computer you might ask similar questions: where will I use the computer? At home on a desk, in the car, in a dirty environment? You will want the computer to conform to the major styles of control format: qwerty keyboard, mouse, some kind of display device. And so on. The way you start your word processor may be slightly, or even very, different on one brand of computer to the next, but there is no one place for the window winder/switch in the car either.

If you were to compare the internal architecture of the car with that of the computer I think you would find neither of them stand out. Would you expect to buy an engine and then select the car body from another supplier?

You complain "...we need to know what software we intend to run before we choose our machine." I think that is similar to saying "it's ridiculous, you have to decide what material you want to cut - wood, brick, glass, etc. - before you buy your power tool." Or "I bought a Mini car but, blow me, I can't fit my favourite tractor wheels to it. What, do I have to get a different car just to pull my plough?!" The car is an appliance with a fairly consistent user interface. But internally one car is as different to another as one computer is to the next. The personal computer is more like a tool. If you can use one brand of electric drill you can probably use another. But that doesn't mean that an orbital sander attachment from one manufacturer will fit any brand of drill.

I just thought you might be interested in this view.

Anthony Hay

Thanks for the perspective. However, I think that such things as buying wheels for a car or attachments for a drill are more akin to replacing a mouse or adding a graphics tablet to a computer. It just crossed my mind that VCRs are an interesting consumer product because there is no standard interface, but competition between incompatible designs resulted in a winner (even if it was not the best technical candidate). FG