Social and Economic Technology - 7.1. Technical Aspects
Is Secotek feasible and Practical?
Secotek promises enormous benefit to rural countryside for only a modest investment. It promises a revolution lead by technology, and not even cutting edge technology at that. Yes, it has all been said many times before, but it never seems to come, like the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The reason for this is fundamentally that the software has never been written right down to the lowest levels for the situation described. To do so may be in public interest, but it is not in any one company's short term commercial interest. That is way funding for it needs special consideration. Most computers "out in the field" are running a system from one company only. Some version of "Windows" from Microsoft. Microsoft did a great deal to popularize computing. However, the product is just not suitable for the environment described.
Windows has up to now covered two basic environments. The business environment where an IT manager has strict control of the facilities available, and the domestic environment where the user is supposedly technically completely incompetent.
Unfortunately software technology is not yet up to coping with a myriad of hardware manufactures each devising their own standards for doing things essential to computing. This has meant in the IT managed business environment, "software maintenance and support" is of very significant cost, and totally impractical with workers that have not established themselves by initially working at the business premises, and continue to regularly call into base. In the domestic environment computers are just considered to be an unreliable toy that users go "wow" to if it actually does something useful.
Microsoft business policies prevent any third party supporting any other environment.
Something different has occurred that could be a salvation to all this. At present it is just effectively a "Mecanno" kit, that some companies have tried to piece together, normally for the same two environments described above. Quite often they then come up with the same problems. However, it is "open" and available, and it would not be beyond the capability of a relatively few supported enthusiasts to piece it together to be the "cars" on the "IT highway" that could provide the situation described on the last page. What I have been describing is called Linux.
Technical Tour - Economic Impacts Tour