New Generations
© Brian Hughes
Personally I'm not holding my breath because although great progress has been made in computer performance, price, size, and flexibility the same can't be said for their simplicity of use or understanding.
To put it another way... in our dreams indeed people. The hardware wizards and the software gurus keep moving the goalposts and new generations of users are continuing to reach for the power switch, mouse, and keyboard. At least I extract some comfort from the fact that whilst I go back far enough to remember when adults and children asked the question "what is a computer?" that time has now passed for good... hopefully!
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Fast moving up my wish list is the time when our genes can be re- engineered so that our computing knowledge is automatically passed on to our offspring. This only needs to be the really simple stuff... simple that is once we know how.
How wonderful to see the first steps taken, the first words spoken... and the first zip file opened!
Sorry about that last one folks but it was that question, yet again, the other day that started this train of thought, and this article. With apologies to those who already know this "how to" I thought I would focus a few articles here and there on some of the real basics.
So many new users... so little time.
Zip, zipping, or zipped are all buzz words for reducing the size of a computer file to save space on a computer hard drive &/or save time in downloading or moving it to another computer. Any file that has the word ".zip" at the end of it's name is a compressed file that has to be expanded to it's original form and size before anything can be done with it.
Other "names" can be used, or more accurately file types, but the most common is zip. For example, Microsoft calls them CAB files, but then MS has always done it's own thing! It doesn't take much surfing around the Internet, and looking for programs to download, to see how common zip files are.
Go To Page: 1 2
