GEARING UP
Softgear. That's an emergency or ad hoc name I'm using to cover all the input, for entertainment and/or instruction, which goes into our hardware, our hard gear, and thereby causes it to make noise and maybe produce pictures. A big order and we need a new name.
In times of really fundamental long range change in, say, the things we deal in (not trying to give them any name!), the fundamental terms them selves go haywire, right along with the status quo when it stops being "quo." I don't think a lot of you out there really believe it yet (because you haven't seen or heard), but this is indeed such a time. Terms get thrown about so fast you can't keep up with them. We latch frantically onto every tricky word that comes along and apply these as fast as we can to our own special bailiwicks, just to show how up-to-date we are. Software, my eye! I'm already sick and tired of calling things like Beethoven by the name of software. Makes me think of a soft-boiled egg. Better a hard nut for him (and a hard one to crack for some of us) than a soft egg.
Besides, software increasingly belongs to developing computer technology, where indeed it must have first appeared. It goes legitimately with bits, addresses, bytes, nand and nor, and the rest of the new logic that builds around the technical instructions which tell a computer, any sort, what to do and in what sequence with what checks and balances. That is the new and stable use of software as a term, and already it should not be mentioned elsewhere except in analogy-"like software." Or if you wish, in metaphor, as the case may be. (Remember from your English class that an analogy says "like" something or "as," whereas a metaphor just calls it that.) Beethoven is like a soft-boiled egg? Thanks, but no.
True, we have a legitimate edge into real software, if you insist. Anything from a phono stylus to a microphone, not to mention a digital signal, does instruct a computer for us if we have a few convenient chips located in our front ends. But this is splitting micro hairs--what we really mean is the body of actual entertainment, or educational instruction, or what have you, that is recorded or broadcast so that we may consume it in our, er, homes (meaning, of course, our cars, RVs, boats, cycles, skates, beauty parlors, supermarkets, saunas, whirlpools-whatever happened to the living room?).
You see what I mean. In times of change, terminology just bogs down, or boggles the mind. So-softgear.
Strictly weaseling on my part, but at least it sets ours apart from the legitimate computer world.
I am more and more taken up these days, in my mind, with this softgear.
You might say I am even worried. Be cause though we look very hard at our new hardware and we are breaking our worldwide necks to develop more of it every day, we act as if softgear is just softgear and won't really matter very much, just so it's there. That's the way everybody acts, except one very vital force in business, the consumer, because he doesn't know the difference--yet.
Ha! The marketplace, as the marketers call it. That's him & her. Ho! The inventory, as the wholesalers might have it. That's also him & her. And then there is that magic, mystic term, sales.
The very embodiment of him & her and we never use it in the singular-a sale is something else again, but sales are just the beginning of what really matters--USE. That, alas, is where the cookie so often crumbles . . . .
Hardware is a nice old term that we can freely use since it long antedates computer science. For maybe a couple of centuries it has been one of those curious one-sided designations, minus any opposite, which serve comfortably, decade after decade, without causing the slightest ripple of confusion. There were hardware stores (but no software) back in the pioneer days, along with dry goods emporia (no wet goods), greengrocers (no white or red grocers), blacksmiths (but, yes, whitesmiths or tinsmiths), and more. If the computer people have appropriated hardware for themselves, so may we.
Leave the wet goods to the skin-diving and aqualung types, who really need the term. Neither do we need grocer, nor smith, unless for that overworked personality, the tunesmith. But hardware--yes. And softgear--yes.
Sorry, they do not match. But neither do binaural, for headphone listening, and stereo for two-eyed separate-photo photography, an exact analog.
These should properly be binaural and binocular, but there we get mixed up with a prior usage for, shall I say, telescopy, and a quite accurate one at that.
In juggling our terminology we have to take practical account of the competition, linguistically speaking. Or the regulations that apply. The ad people have no trouble with all this-they sometimes just don't call it anything, and substitute adjectives. Those boxes you see with RICHER, FLUFFIER, SMOOTHER on them and nothing else.
Dodge a lot of problems in that fashion. But we haven't reached that stage quite yet.
You can look back and see how terminology has jumped the rails in many a past time of rapid change. What's your field? Electronics? In times past your field was an expanse of agricultural land newly bounded in by fencing, where once the land was open and unfettered for all the people. That was a terrible time of change, particularly in England, and it wasn't that far back. Queen Elizabeth knew all about it. Revolution was in the air and there was violence everywhere, as the fences went up. No wonder that, in changed circumstances, "field" is still a very strong term today and the skirmishes around the fences still are plenty sharp. Right? You can even apply this to a magnetic field, which is by definition a matter of force, within an area yet extending its influence out wards....
If you think I am straying from the point, you are quite right; it is deliberate. If we ourselves are thrashing about from hither to yon trying to decide what will be the big thing this year and next and what shall we call it then I figure my writing should accurately reflect that situation. A kind of internal drama, like the "smellies" we often hear about (but never smell) or the earthquake movie. These approaches are not too farfetched.
Awhile back I got a fancy catalog of roses from a nursery; it took me quite awhile to realize that the faint scent of roses I kept noticing came from the paper.
So the thing that we must under stand about softgear is its extraordinarily precise demands on us, the in credible exactitude with which it must be shaped and honed to fit its own hardware, if we are to profit by both.
Every tiny change in hardware, in its shape, its parameters, the specs of its performance, its means of distribution, above all the way it operates in use, directly affects the softgear that will make it go in the marketplace and in the, er, home, such as home is. It's like the environment. You kill off some itty bitty fish in a little old stream and next thing you know the lions and tigers in Africa are dying and the dinosaurs are back. We all should be worrying about softw-whoops, I mean softgear even more than the environmentalists, because this is our environment, it is what counts.
And yet-what do we see? Compatibility is the name of our wishful thinking! What do you do when you finally develop a videocassette, that is, a means for recording and reproducing signals in the video medium? You just handily turn over your old stocks of entertainment, which will do just fine.
What happens when a compact digital audio disc comes along? Why what else-transfer the old recordings straight to the new medium and the problem is no more. Compatibility, you bet. But viability? Does anyone truly know--yet? Strange--so strange--that whereas the audio disc has been a solid and at times brilliant success for almost a hundred years, the videodisc, its precise counterpart and with immense ad vantages technically, and admirable features (build a home library of entertainment, great classics, etc. at your finger tips . . .), is oddly sluggish and doesn't seem to want to get started in any big way. While at the same time people keep right on buying that alter native video product, the VCR, because it works and has found its place-unforeseen as that may have been, at the beginning.
I've always suspected that, like the audio cassette (a late but great starter), the videocassette was a lucky strike, even if Sony, that clever outfit, may have had some sneaky and very correct ideas as to what it might do best, back some 10 years ago. You remember? The vast "TV cartridge" marathon involved six or seven revolutionary and wholly incompatible systems, so great did the potential seem to be at that time-and every one died a ghastly corporate death, to the tune of literally billions in losses, except the relatively old-fashioned tape videocassette, an adaptation of professional video recording already in existence, the least revolutionary of all the systems and, you might say, the tamest.
Of course! It took off because suddenly there was an absolutely unforeseen area of softgear that the others hadn't thought about. You recorded right off your TV, and you didn't do it to build up a grrreat classic library but mainly so you could look at it later on and erase it when you felt like something else. If I dare say so, even CBS didn't think of that, with its admirable EVR video sys tem, which could not record.
What we must do with our new hard ware, our new systems, is to probe and feel and experiment, gingerly, carefully, until we begin to sense an area for softgear breakthrough. If we have any sense, that is how we go at it. Compatibility-just use the old softgear all over again? That is merely a temporary little bridge, useful for a time, which gives us leeway to work on the far side-like those wooden planks and ramps they put down for pedestrians when a new building is going up. Yes, you can throw in all the old (and new) softgear you have on hand, compatibly, and for awhile everybody is happy. But not for long. Never for very long.
If you do not find the key to the new softgear demands, and satisfy those changed demands, you are a dead duck. Speaking of ducks, it is like closing your eyes and shooting a shotgun blast in the general direction of a flock of those birds. You are bound to hit at least a few, though which ones you cannot know-and, just maybe, one of these will turn out to be the duck that lays the golden egg.
Indeed, the contours of a successful softgear are astonishingly subtle, it is agony to look ahead and try to see their future shape. Practically nobody ever does. Most success is accidental--with a few remarkable exceptions and those almost always on the artistic side. Those early film producers and actors, for instance, who understood the power of the silent film and the means whereby it could convey sense even without sound. And again some of the same--Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Chaplin--who sensed further that this medium needed longer films, not only funnier but deeper, more involving. Can you credit this to engineering or to business? It was the non technical minds who saw ahead, though they were intimate with the hardware aspect, knew exactly what it could do and, more important, what it might do.
The true engineers make these things possible and they work towards still better hardware in the indicated directions. But, after all, Edison invented only a dictating machine, not a phonograph. And a moving picture, not a film. It is the softgear, every time, that does it. Right now, I can't see we're thinking beyond the compatible bridge in any of our directions.
Well, give us time. Long rows to hoe in a very big field.
(adapted from Audio magazine, Jun. 1983; EDWARD TATNALL CANBY)
= = = =