Holdovers

My family has a collection of old cars: Model T’s, Model A’s, Hupmobiles, Studebakers and Cadillacs. My grandpa has been collecting them since he was seven (that’s not a typo) because Idaho is still the sort of hick place where a seven-year-old boy could buy a Model T and no one would raise an eyebrow. I mention all of this mostly to state that I spent a portion of my childhood messing around with old cars, never realizing that some of them had a dashboard mount for a whip, and for as much as twenty years after motor cars became the standard of transportation. That alarmed me a little.

Upon reflecting what I have spent a majority of my life around (cameras and computers) I think that there are plenty of holdovers that we hold onto either because of nostalgia or just straight ignorance. We just forgot they were there.

Take for instance that Caps Lock button. When was the last time anyone used the Caps Lock button, aside from old people writing mass emails? What is its actual function? Since none of us have to write code that requires all-caps, it’s pretty safe to assume that we could just scrap it for a more functional key, like ctrl or cmmd, or make it a save key. Only recently have computer manufactures scrapped the Caps Lock button, most ingeniously by Google who replaced it with a Google Search Key. Press it, and get a Google Search bar.

There are other holdovers that we refuse to get rid of out of fear or maybe inadequacy. Steve Jobs introduced the first Graphic User Interface operating system in the early 80’s and implemented a mouse to navigate it. However, as technology has improved and become more mobile, GUIs are becoming increasingly touch based, and Steve Jobs has tried desperately to kill off the mouse in recent years introducing several touch-screen products, a touch-pad for desktops and a mouse that was half trackpad. Yet how many of us can’t think of life without out a mouse (I’m looking at you, PC users, and your ‘right click’ neurosis).

What other holdovers are there that I don’t even think about? What are ways that we can streamline our technology, our design to eliminate these relics? These aren’t rhetorical questions, btw. I’m just not going to be the one who answers them.