The Magic of the Download
By J. Allen Leinberger

There was a time when just buying a computer wasn’t enough. You had to spend hours loading in all of the programs that you planned to use. These programs, of course, were determined by the kind of work you wanted your computer to do.
Some people wanted computers for school studies; some for sales; some for scientific studies and some for graphic’s work. I have often likened the computer to a record player and the programs to records. Your computer does the job that you run.
Over the years those programs, or records, have evolved. Early on they were just punch cards. By the early nineties, they were 5-inch floppy disks. By the middle nineties they became three and a half-inch plastic disks. These were ridged, but the name floppy continued.
As programming grew and became more sophisticated, CD disks replaced the floppy. This required CD players instead of floppy slots. Since CDs were being added, the CD player was added. This evolved into the iTunes program.
Early on in the 21st century, programming became so large that DVD disks replaced the CD disk. Packaging did not evolve much though.
Cardboard and plastic boxes were found sitting on the shelves above computers everywhere. Most boxes also contained inch thick manuals about how to run the intricacies of the program. Eventually some of these manuals disappeared, which was OK because there were enough other books being published about how to run the programs. The …For Dummies series featured just about every program released, MAC or PC.
Other books included the Missing Manual series (generated by computer guru David Pogue) filled the gap. Many such books even had their own floppies or CDs with added programs to add and enhance the basic package.
It was only a couple of years ago that the iMac Air came out. It had no drive at all. Any program that you wanted it to run had to be downloaded. This came as no surprise to me since I had spoken to David Pogue over a decade ago when he had predicted to me that on-line programming and gaming would become the next wave.
The iTunes model has become the norm. Today, many programs are available on disk or by download. Like iTunes you can just click on the program, punch in your credit card number, and everything downloads. In some cases even the manual is available for download on-line.
The next major download for Apple’s operating system will come out this fall. It is called Snow Leopard. (The current 10.5 program is called Leopard.) Snow Leopard will only be available on-line. For under $40, you can upgrade your computer with no trip to the Apple store. This will probably impact the people at Best Buy as well as the mail order houses like Mac Mall. Of course, they can still sell the hardware. It’s just the software that they have been edged out on.
There are two good things to come out of this. First is a decline in pirating. It is not easy to copy all of the parts of a program to pass on to somebody else. Such copying is technically illegal because the copy has not been paid for. It’s just like those bootleg copies of DVDs that they sell at the laundromat down the block from me.
The second advantage is the “Green” advantage. One of the greatest complaints of environmentalists is the cardboard and plastic waste of such packages. By eliminating the boxes in the stores, you eliminate the garbage. It’s no different than the banks and credit unions who no longer use deposit slips.
I spoke of all this recently when I talked about the lack of hard inventory for music and movies with the iTunes downloads. Now that we can have access to anything that can be converted to a digital feed, we may never have records or tapes or CDs or DVDs.
We will continue to need hard drives and some sort of transportation system, like flash sticks, but the boxes and packaging, along with the floppy disks and program CDs, are rapidly becoming another addition to what I have referred to as “Twentieth Century Technology.”