The other day, my partner and I were discussing why so many people have issues with the idea and use of virtual machines. We couldn’t figure it out, as those same people often have no problem with the concept of remoting into other machines located elsewhere and using them.

We eventually arrived at the idea that most people’s idea of a computer is a physical system whereas our idea of a computer is far more abstract. She has a formal computer science background and I an informal one, but we are both working from the same base: a computer is a Turing machine that processes bits one by one. When I think of a computer I don’t think of anything specific, just an infinite tape and the operations being performed on it. The substrate could be anything at all, from an iPhone to a Cray X-MP.

However, when most regular users and all too many technical people think of a computer, they imagine a beige box or similar with an Intel sticker on the outside — and how could you make that virtual? Why, that doesn’t make any sense! It’s not a character in World of Warcraft, duh, it can’t be virtual!

Some time ago, I attempted to get a woman at work to use virtual machines on her PC to resolve conflicts of applications that couldn’t be installed on the same PC together due to incompatibility. She couldn’t do it. She had no problems at all remoting into a terminal server for the same purpose. There was no real difference in what she was doing (she was also remoting into a virtual machine, unbeknownst to her), but her mind couldn’t handle the virtual machine concept and just rebelled.

I find this really interesting because I can’t make sense of it no matter how hard I try.