As someone who has grown up during the computer revolution, I can look at today’s society and marvel at how computers changed so many things in our lives.

A phrase I repeat in my posts is “I blame Windows,” which refers to the idea that Windows allowed a user to customize lots of different visual and behavior aspects, which then caused the user to expect that sort of custom, tailored experience in the real world, which then possibly contributed to the self-centered nature of younger generations.  Maybe.

But the thing I was thinking about last night was how computers have introduced language that possibly would never have entered into the mainstream otherwise.  I’m not talking about computer-specific terminology, despite my slight fascination of the term “drive” – disk drive, floppy drive, hard drive, usb drive, flash drive, and thumb drive.  I am talking about a couple of terms that possibly existed (I can’t be bothered to take the 10 seconds and check) but were of no concern to people until they got computers.  For example:

Font.  Everyone that uses a computer now knows about fonts and what they are used for.  That’s because everyone that got a computer has become a publisher in some way or another.  Even with something as simple as emails, you could get a admonishment, “your font is difficult to read/too big/ too small/ the wrong color/not installed on my computer”.

Back in “the old days”, you had a typewriter that had one font – Courier New.  You never had to worry about fonts.  Even people who wanted to care about them and wanted to sound artsy or something would say, “that’s a really nice typestyle on that advertisement”, which would lead a more pretentious artsy person to say, “It’s not a typestyle, it’s a typeface.”  But now everything is a font and everyone knows what that is.

Portrait and Landscape.  I don’t think these terms existed before computers, but I also don’t think they are strictly computer terms.  Maybe they existed in the publishing and photography industries, don’t feel like checking.  The thing I know is that before computers, we used terms like “vertically” and “long-ways” to describe orientation.  What a clever naming convention, too.  Describe portrait orientation to someone.  “It’s like a portrait”  And landscape – “It’s like a picture of a landscape.”  However, it is possible to have a portrait of a landscape taken in portrait orientation, but displayed in landscape.  That is a bit confusing to explain to someone.

Today, I read that there is a bittorrent client for Windows Phone.  So, I’m pretty damn confused now.

People are shunning desktop PCs because they don’t want to have to deal with the “computer-y” stuff.  But people want to do more “computer-y” stuff on their phones, despite the fact that the UI is less optimized for such tasks.

I’m wondering where the middle is, if there is one.  Will computers look like phones, like how OSX is morphing into iOS and the Windows 8 UI becomes standard across devices?  Will phones look more like PCs, like what we already had and hated with Windows Mobile?

People want to do one thing at a time and have multiple things going at one time.  The desktop metaphor has become too complex for people, but they complain when you can’t easily switch between apps on a phone.

Every single possible size of screen is available from phones, to phablets, to tablets, to laptops, to desktops, to multi-display desktops.  Everyone bitches that this one or that one is too big or too small or too heavy or too fragile.