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When the world began and it was necessary for people to communicate, they simply spoke to the other and their words were their bond. Adam had things going along fairly well with the naming of the animals and such, but like anyone would suspect after working so hard and coming up with thousands of names, he got a little bored and spoke up and mentioned that he was lonely and would like someone to play with.
In the due course of events, he was accommodated. As his companion stood there he was thinking about what to call his new friend. Then he thought "EVE." Yeah, cool, that would work out great. Eve: that which comes before. Then he did it. He blurted it out. He almost yelled "Eve!" His new friend turned and looked at him, shy and sly and coy, and said "Yes, honey. . . What do you want now? It took you long enough to come up with a name for me. I was tempted to finish up all this naming business on my own. Just what is it with you anyway?" It was at that moment that he realized just how appropriate her name was. She would always be coming before and he would be lucky if he even got the last word in edgewise.
It was shortly after that time when Adam spoke up again and indicated that he needed a way to record, in some permanent manner, the names he was giving things, because Eve was always getting there before him and confusing matters. What self-respecting animal would want to be called a "duck-billed platypus" anyway, he grumbled. Once again, Adam had his request granted and he received the "tablets."
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He quickly found out that this gift was a two-edged sword. He could record the names he gave to things, but those tablets couldn't be moved around very easily. And if one of them got bumped or knocked about, then that was the end of it. Sometimes the information could be recovered, but more often than not, all of the data had to be reentered. And heaven forbid if a bug found its way into things. Then you could spend months cleaning things up and debugging all the work. There was one other problem that always had to be taken into consideration. When the tablets dried, they became hard-hard as a disk. Some were even called hardware! If a bug got stuck in the hardware, then the entire system could fail. As time progressed the tablets that became disks got thinner and thinner and smaller and smaller. They even got to where they could be folded and slipped into a pocket.
It seems that history repeats itself. We first had the "Word"-or was it WordPerfect? One or the other, they were pretty much the same. Then the Word had to be documented, cleaned up, debugged and sometimes put right into the hardware. And we are recording data on object that get smaller and thinner almost on a daily basis.
The tablets are now laptops, palmtops, pads, pilots or PIMs. We are asking them to do more and more with less and less and we are even folding them and putting them into our pockets. Smaller, faster, and better has been the rule from the beginning of time, and today we are keeping that rule in mind while adding a version of the first rule of business success. Instead of "location, location, location," we are saying "function, function, function."
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