We Don’t Need Computers

Bob Young
5 min readDec 19, 2020

Today I had a thought about how “we don’t need computers.” It sounds absurd, but bear with me; I’m trying to introduce you to a new way of looking at computers and the information they process.

Server Rack (photo by Author)

When I was a boy and had a bike, I had to “maintain” it. The idea was to keep it working as long as possible, with tip-top performance.

When I was a young man and had a car, I had to “maintain” it. The idea was to keep it working as long as possible, with tip-top performance.

In my adult career, I worked on various kinds of electronics systems, and I had to “maintain” them. The idea was to keep them working as long as possible, with tip-top performance.

But now, in 2020, the concept of maintaining information systems isn’t really accurate. We have to “advance” them. I’ll explain what I mean by that.

Examples are numerous. I know of an update to an LMS (Learning Management System) that was designed to work with HTML5 because it was more secure than Flash. The company where I was working at the time couldn’t upgrade to the new LMS version using HTML5 because the Point-of-Sale (POS) system hadn’t been updated. It required the older version of the browser that used Flash. It was a domino effect: the POS application needed a browser that used Flash. The LMS application needed a browser that used HTML5. So the…

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Bob Young

CISO, Director of Information Security, and Security Consultant. Also, I wrote some books that have nothing to do with IT. http://www.amazon.com/author/bobyoung