Digital Beetles

One of the most popular cars ever was the Volkswagen Beetle, originally designed as a cheap, ‘people’ car. It was not popular because it was fast, or safe, or aerodynamic, or comfortable (although I don’t know of a single man my age who didn’t have some of his most memorable initial experiences with members of the opposite gender on the back seat, and Lord knows how many of you youngsters were that brief spark in an unsuspecting Daddy’s eye on that same seat).

Despite newer and better technologies (leading to magnificent motor vehicles) the Beetle persisted until recently because it fulfilled a vital function: moving people and things around cheaply. Very few folk, other than us sentimental old men in our dotage, aspired to a Beetle. It was a stepping stone from stasis to movement, and it offered mobility, training, the ability to earn an income, the ability to engage in contortionist reproductive practices, automotive immortality, and if the Volkswagen adverts are to be believed, the ability to embarrass our children by passing our beloved Fokswagen on to them to park in the UCT parking lot amongst the Ferrarris and Lamborghinis of youngsters of lesser disadvantage.

(Audi has an advert in which they claim that the Audi A6 resulted in 9621 patents being filed, while NASA – in their entire history – have only filed 6000 odd patents. Who cares, we just want transport. How much did those patent filings cost, we cry. And why should we pay for them?)

In other words, the Beetle took a pedestrian and delivered a driver – and driving is one of this new world’s most important skills. If you can’t drive, and you don’t have a vehicle, your ability to earn an income is significantly impaired.

I am going to ask you to help a few folk this year, by giving them digital Beetles.

Almost every one of us replaces our technology every few years – usually in order to keep pace with Microsoft’s rapacious appetite for speed. This is about to happen again with Vista, which may or may not run faster than a one-legged seagull on your older PCs, if it runs at all.

Given my past attempts to share the benefits of considering alternative operating systems which inevitably descend into mundane squabbling over whether Linux and Windows are 100% or 105% compatible – usually fueled by folk who prefer not to be confused by the facts – I am not going to suggest these as an alternative to Windows/Vista. BUT I’d love you to share that old iron with the millions of people in SA who have no other chance of getting onto the digital highway.

Here is the suggestion. Take every PC you replace and install a free copy of Linux onto it. This will completely overwrite and wipe your data from the hard disk. And then give that machine to somebody who can use it to learn to drive on the digital road – a local school, your maid’s children, a local charity. Anybody, in fact, who otherwise could not afford a PC.

I am a little worried about suggesting this because the moment you see how easy it is to do this, and how easy it is to use Linux, and how free all the software is, you probably won’t want to give your old digital Beetle away, because underneath its dull beige coat lurks the heart of a Porsche Boxster just waiting to be freed.

I am embarrassed to say that in the first world computing and the Internet are ubiquitous – an indispensable component of life. That is not the case for more than 40 million South Africans. But give them a PC with Linux, and wait a few years, and we will have a crop of the finest Internet programmers on earth, holding their own amongst the Indians (people in India, not Durban) and the Chinese, and surpassing the lazy sods in the First world.

Plant that seed today, please. You can download Linux here, or you can head for the nearest PC shop and buy a Linux magazine (which always has a free copy attached). It’s by far the most eco-friendly way to dispose of your old kit, and it may even be tax-deductible. And if you’re in that BBBEE space where you need to help others to gain points, this is a superb way of doing just that with the minimum of pain, and the most gain.

As they say, give a man a fish and he eats today, but teach him how to phish, and you feed him forever. (Hey, this is Africa we’re talking about, and to the rest of the world Johannesburg is the capital of Nigeria. The schools up north do not devote nearly as much time to international issues as South African schools used to.)

“Linux,” I hear you mutter with the disdain a 6 year old usually reserves for broccoli. I must give you the same response I give them: don’t say a word until you’ve tasted it. Only then are you qualified to cast aspersions. Just as we humans share about 98% of our DNA with some very hairy creatures, so do Windows, Linux and Apple look and work the same about 98% of the way. Of course, the magic is in that last 2%.