The Green Screen of Death
At an IBM-oriented conference, a group of midrange pros stand chewing the fat between seminars. A senior IT guy at a multinational is bemoaning the demands of his users from both above and below. "They just want a nice, pretty GUI," he says, the latter part in little girly voice. The group all chuckle at this knowingly.
These are, after all, grown-up business computer people. They laugh because they know the real value of the good old green screen: fast data entry, efficient order processing—all that stuff. Plus, they know that their users' desires are driven by the ephemeral experiences of their personal lives. Lives where cartoons of doggies chasing their tails or smiley dancing bank managers or kiddies playing with balloons glimmer out of EPOS systems, bank ATMs, and numerous other screens everywhere they go.
Our group of veterans finds the idea of adding to this cacophony of animation most amusing. Big Blue never foisted a native GUI onto their big systems. There are many ways to modernize a proper application and, as adults, IBM gives them the choice of how to proceed.
The problem is, though, that many don't proceed at all. And—hands up—I have been a member of a group like this, and I've laughed along at the GUI thing myself. However, it's time to face facts: The number's up for the AS/400's traditional interface. Those familiar green letters on a black background now spell just one word: death.
Culturally, I mean this in a literal sense. In any modern TV show or film, if a character encounters a legacy-looking computer interface, it's dramatic shorthand for something old, mysterious, inscrutable, and, more often than not, downright dangerous. The makers of sci-fi shows seem particularly keen on this. Lovingly crafted, future-retro scary screens adorn anything remotely alien or dystopian.
The writing was probably on the wall as far back as 1999, when film producers the Wachowskis employed a menacing motif of vertical green-on-black Japanese half-width kana computer text in The Matrix. Somewhat ironically, this green rain effect became the RPG programmer's screensaver of choice for many years afterwards.
Given this background, it's fairly surprising that anyone under the age of, say, 35 can be persuaded to operate an old fashioned-looking application at all. And, if you were an ISV, imagine asking them to go out and actually sell one.
As time goes by, I find more and more anecdotal evidence to back this up. As one example, the other day, my wife and I were waiting for a train in the concourse of our local station. We were near two ATMs for the same bank. The station wasn't particularly busy, so there was no real queue for the machines.
"Watch this," I said, "they always go to the machine on the left." And people kept on doing just that. My wife said, "How do you know?" The answer was simple: The forlorn ATM on the right had an old-school text screen; the one on the left showed a smiling, helpful-looking woman dressed in the livery of the bank. Even older people almost always chose the bright, GUI-fied ATM.
Or take another example. This time, my wife and I were at a department store. The items we'd seen on a previous visit were no longer on display. A helpful assistant said they were out of stock, but she could check whether they had any at the store's other local outlets or whether she could order them. On her EPOS system, she started hopping between a catalogue-type web app (graphical, with photos) and a green screen.
"AS/400," I said to my wife. "It's what he writes about," she explained, apologetically, to the quizzical assistant. The assistant, a mature lady, told us that the younger staff hated the old green screen application. She, on the other hand, still rather liked it, even though she now had to skip from one system to the other. She'd been using it for over 20 years and even showed us how fast she could whizz around it.
"Still," she said, adamantly, "we do need a new system."
I'm not sure what you can do about that. Yes, modernization can be expensive: A decent-sized project can cost around the same amount as the annual wage of one of your IT team. Yes, you need to be careful about the methods you use to make apps fit for the 21st century. But there is a vibrant ecosystem of firms dedicated to the task and a plethora of advice on the subject on this website alone.
That's not to say that apps should be modernised for the sake of it. But a new approach does offer the opportunity to improve and, crucially, future-proof systems. Current skill sets need to be weighed against various approaches. New skills may have to be adopted, and you might even have to involve design-oriented folk.
Of course, in a real-life world of order-fulfilments and supply chain headaches, there will always be other priorities to find. But admit it—it's over for the green screen. To cling to its nostalgic embrace any longer is to consign yourself and your work to history.
There will still be midrange professionals chuckling, patronizingly, over this kind of heresy amongst themselves for some time to come (a few, no doubt, over HD video-conference links on big boardroom touch screens). But one wonders how long it will take them to realize that the joke might, very soon, be on them.
At an IBM-oriented conference, a group of midrange pros stand chewing the fat between seminars. A senior IT guy at a multinational is bemoaning the demands of his users from both above and below. "They just want a nice, pretty GUI," he says, the latter part in little girly voice. The group all chuckle at this knowingly.
These are, after all, grown-up business computer people. They laugh because they know the real value of the good old green screen: fast data entry, efficient order processing—all that stuff. Plus, they know that their users' desires are driven by the ephemeral experiences of their personal lives. Lives where cartoons of doggies chasing their tails or smiley dancing bank managers or kiddies playing with balloons glimmer out of EPOS systems, bank ATMs, and numerous other screens everywhere they go.
Our group of veterans finds the idea of adding to this cacophony of animation most amusing. Big Blue never foisted a native GUI onto their big systems. There are many ways to modernize a proper application and, as adults, IBM gives them the choice of how to proceed.
The problem is, though, that many don't proceed at all. And—hands up—I have been a member of a group like this, and I've laughed along at the GUI thing myself. However, it's time to face facts: The number's up for the AS/400's traditional interface. Those familiar green letters on a black background now spell just one word: death.
Culturally, I mean this in a literal sense. In any modern TV show or film, if a character encounters a legacy-looking computer interface, it's dramatic shorthand for something old, mysterious, inscrutable, and, more often than not, downright dangerous. The makers of sci-fi shows seem particularly keen on this. Lovingly crafted, future-retro scary screens adorn anything remotely alien or dystopian.
The writing was probably on the wall as far back as 1999, when film producers the Wachowskis employed a menacing motif of vertical green-on-black Japanese half-width kana computer text in The Matrix. Somewhat ironically, this green rain effect became the RPG programmer's screensaver of choice for many years afterwards.
Given this background, it's fairly surprising that anyone under the age of, say, 35 can be persuaded to operate an old fashioned-looking application at all. And, if you were an ISV, imagine asking them to go out and actually sell one.
As time goes by, I find more and more anecdotal evidence to back this up. As one example, the other day, my wife and I were waiting for a train in the concourse of our local station. We were near two ATMs for the same bank. The station wasn't particularly busy, so there was no real queue for the machines.
"Watch this," I said, "they always go to the machine on the left." And people kept on doing just that. My wife said, "How do you know?" The answer was simple: The forlorn ATM on the right had an old-school text screen; the one on the left showed a smiling, helpful-looking woman dressed in the livery of the bank. Even older people almost always chose the bright, GUI-fied ATM.
Or take another example. This time, my wife and I were at a department store. The items we'd seen on a previous visit were no longer on display. A helpful assistant said they were out of stock, but she could check whether they had any at the store's other local outlets or whether she could order them. On her EPOS system, she started hopping between a catalogue-type web app (graphical, with photos) and a green screen.
"AS/400," I said to my wife. "It's what he writes about," she explained, apologetically, to the quizzical assistant. The assistant, a mature lady, told us that the younger staff hated the old green screen application. She, on the other hand, still rather liked it, even though she now had to skip from one system to the other. She'd been using it for over 20 years and even showed us how fast she could whizz around it.
"Still," she said, adamantly, "we do need a new system."
I'm not sure what you can do about that. Yes, modernization can be expensive: A decent-sized project can cost around the same amount as the annual wage of one of your IT team. Yes, you need to be careful about the methods you use to make apps fit for the 21st century. But there is a vibrant ecosystem of firms dedicated to the task and a plethora of advice on the subject on this website alone.
That's not to say that apps should be modernised for the sake of it. But a new approach does offer the opportunity to improve and, crucially, future-proof systems. Current skill sets need to be weighed against various approaches. New skills may have to be adopted, and you might even have to involve design-oriented folk.
Of course, in a real-life world of order-fulfilments and supply chain headaches, there will always be other priorities to find. But admit it—it's over for the green screen. To cling to its nostalgic embrace any longer is to consign yourself and your work to history.
There will still be midrange professionals chuckling, patronizingly, over this kind of heresy amongst themselves for some time to come (a few, no doubt, over HD video-conference links on big boardroom touch screens). But one wonders how long it will take them to realize that the joke might, very soon, be on them.
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