But what does it do, Ug?

When IBM released the original PC, industry pundits were astonished. Instead of proprietory IBM components, it used an off-the-shelf Intel 8 bit CPU, the 8088. The source code to the BIOS was included in the manuals. Any manufacturer could produce compatible plugin cards for it.

But that was nearly 30 years ago. It's been an amazing ride since then, but what's become very clear is that the initial open design ethos and the hacker culture that went with it, may be drawing to a close.

What provoked these thoughts was the unveiling of Apple's iPad and the subsequent industry speculation about Apple's first homegrown processor, the A4. Was it an ARM-based chip, as originally thought, or possibly a PowerPC architecture?. Electron microscopes have been wheeled out to settle the argument, and pundits have pontificated that certain microscopic features point to Samsung as the manufacturer.

I don't know about you, but I find this astonishing. In essence, Apple has reduced us all to a bunch of cavemen (and women), like the apes in 2001, gesticulating with their primitive bone tools at the mysterious black monolith, whose workings they could never hope to comprehend.

And Apple are not alone here. Let's quote from Harald Welte, who has published a very interesting and informative guide to how a GSM phone actually works. This is what he had to say

QUOTE
The GSM industry is one of the most closed areas of computing that I've encountered so far. It is very hard to get any hard technical information out of them. All they like to spread is high-level marketing information, but they're very reluctant when it comes down to hard technical facts on their products.
UNQUOTE

He's quite right, of course. Interested in the inner workings of that Qualcomm Snapdragon processor that powers your latest phone?. You'll look in vain for technical manuals on the internet, they're a trade secret. (its older sister, the MSM7201, does have manuals available, but you have to search very hard to find them and they are clearly marked as highly confidential, so it's only a matter of time before Qualcomm gets them pulled out of circulation).

As Harald points out, information on how the baseband processor that actually does the heavy lifting works is even more tightly restricted.

But, remember, we're CONSUMERS. Consumers don't pull things apart to discover how they work, as children, so that they can pursue a career in engineering later in their lives. Consumers consume. Indeed, this is exactly what so many commentators have said about the iPad; it is a device for consuming content, not producing it.

I read this week that one possible explanation for the Fermi Paradox (where are the aliens?) is that any advanced civilisation eventually becomes self-obsessed and turns in on itself. Thus we have Twitter and Facebook (and, I suppose, this blog, for that matter) but we no longer have a credible active space program and dreams of landing on Mars or sending probes to Alpha Centauri are just that - dreams. Meanwhile our creative energies are spent raising virtual crops in Farmville.

I feel sad that the promise so evident in the original IBM PC - a promise that, in essence, started the whole personal computer revolution in that it transcended proprietary designs and created a level playing field on which all could compete, both in the hardware and software arena - has come to this, a return to proprietary design, trade secrets and locked-down systems that verify that the software that runs on them has been digitally signed before it is permitted to execute - to execute, mind you, on hardware that (we might hope) we own, and have paid for.

But we are where we are. Consumers have voted with their wallets that walled gardens such as Apple's (or Sony's, with the recent forced removal of Linux support from the PS3) are what they want and.. well, let me quote the Eagles....

.... and freedom, oh freedom
well that's just some people talking....