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Honolulu Lite
AT the gigantic Comdex computer show in Las Vegas this week, Microsoft founder Bill Gates apparently got a little misty-eyed as a wave of nostalgia swept over him. Technology clash
leaves votes hangingThe wave apparently originated in Florida and swept across the country, swamping thousands of computer nerds in a tidal surge of irony. The wave was not caused by some storm in the Gulf of Mexico but by a simple image of a bunch of people in a vote-counting room in Palm Beach holding up ancient computer cards to the light to see if they had been properly punched.
I felt the wave of nostalgia also, because those cards resembled the old Fortran cards we punched by the thousands in college too many years ago to count. The cards were fed into computers because the software had not yet been invented that allowed you to type in data by keyboard.
And, here they were again, these archaic reminders of a past computer era, the corpus delecti of the biggest legal case in political history; the flimsy, cardboard evidence that will determine the next president of the United States.
With a mere click of the cordless television remote control (which had not even been invented during the heyday of computer punch cards) we could jump from the anthropological expedition in Florida, where politicians were digging for votes, to the computer exposition in Las Vegas, where super geeks were digging all the new technology.
They were playing with phones that turn into computers and pens that turned into phones and toasters that turned into ink-jet printers and microwave ovens that not only popped corn but showed first-run movies via the Internet through the front glass panel. There were 400 acres of advanced electronic gadgets, any one of which could send a man to Mars and get 400 channels of cable television programming to boot. The brainiacs talked in terms of bytes, megabytes, gigabytes, terabytes, azillionfreakinbytes, ram, dram and gigaflops. And then -- possibly on a combination frozen drink blender/streaming video machine/CNN direct downlink terminal -- a word floated out among the Comdex crowd. The word was "chad." The word originated in Palm Beach and bounced off several satellites in synchronous orbit above the earth before softly landing in Vegas like a digital snowflake.
Chad: a small piece of paper punched from a punch card.
Chads! Election officials in Florida were counting chads! How charming! Little chads. Those hangy little squares of paper from an earlier computer age, an age as old as Columbus. It was like coming across a quill pen in the back of a desk. Ah, chads. Hanging chads, dangling chads, pregnant chads, sniff, we knew ye. Ye messed up many a computer run, you little buggers. Which is why we left you behind.
And, here they were again. But could it be true? The outcome of a presidential election depended on chads?
Sadly, true. And then armies of lawyers, election officials and forensic chad analysts tried to determine what was in the mind of each voter who did not have the requisite strength or aim to properly punch their ballots to detach the chads.
So you can't blame Bill Gates tearing up a little bit. It was painful to watch, like a group of monkeys trying to work a Palm Pilot. And, the irony was too much. If government officials had used his technology instead of trying to break up Microsoft, the election wouldn't hang on a chad.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
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