The One Time Wasting was Good

Can the act of deliberately wasting anything ever be a good thing? We all know of examples to the contrary: cutting down too many trees, excessive use of plastics, not turning off that tap etc etc etc. Sure, we all know of items to add to that list. All of them result in unpleasant and disastrous results.

And yet, there is that one spectacular example where wasting one particular item resulted has produced spectacular results. In a good way. That item is the transistor, the ingredient of every electronic chip we see in everything from PC’s and cellphones to microwave ovens.

But where’s the connection to wasting anything? As the cost of manufacturing transistors fell rapidly in the late 1970’s, a Caltech professor, Carver Mead started telling programmers to waste transistors. But what does it mean to “waste” a transistor? It sounds like a Zen question! Alan Kay, an engineer working at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s figured the answer. He started doing playful things on the computer screen: he added animations, drew pictures, steered pointers with a mouse. Did he have a purpose in mind? Nah, he was just wasting the it’s-so-cheap processing power. For the fun of it. To give it a cool look. It was all just purposeless eye candy.

But others saw what Kay had done and realized that all the eye candy suddenly made computers usable by pretty much anybody. You no longer needed to learn arcane commands to operate a computer. Just point and click. And thus was born the PC market. And eventually the Internet. After all, if the Internet could only be operated by typing some weird commands instead of pointing and clicking, how many of us would be using it today?

And to think it all started because one guy encouraged programmers to waste!