The computer as "a bicycle for our minds"

In setting up this blog, which covers two pretty separate topics (computers and bicycles), I found myself thinking about why I like both so much and some of the ways in which they might relate to each other.

I got as far as thinking about how computers and bicycles both help me do more stuff, in a way that can feel like magic.

I’ll never forget the feeling I had the first time I got on my touring bike. Loaded with 20kg of luggage, I was barely able to walk it onto the road without dropping it. But when I started pedalling down that road, it fully felt like flying.

Wierd as this sounds, it really wasn’t dissimilar to how I felt the first time I created a client and server with a few lines of Ruby code and watched one ping the other.

In both cases, a new world had opened to me, and the possibilities seemed endless.

Then I came across this quote from Steve Jobs, from an interview which he gave for the documentary ‘Memory and Imagination’ in 1990:

“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good.

But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

Makes perfect sense to me.