Ghosts Of Computers Past
April 26th, 2009 by ComputerBob
Some of us have been using personal computers since they first came on the scene many years ago.
It’s amazing to me to think back at some of the computers that I’ve owned or used in the past. One had only 4KB of RAM. One had a 40-character, text-only, dark-gray-on-light-gray LCD screen. A few of them didn’t have any monitor output, but connected to a normal TV set instead. None of my first computers had a floppy drive, but instead required me to save and load programs to and from a normal cassette recorder. And the CPU speed of those first computers was less than 10 megahertz, compared to today’s CPUs, which run at multiple gigahertz (thousands of megahertz).
I was using computers back in the days before Microsoft existed — and a decade or more before the first glimmers of the world wide web.
I believe that I was the very first person in my alma mater’s Masters degree in technology program to ever use a word processor, instead of a typewriter, to write his Masters thesis. In fact, back then, nearly everyone was paying professional typists $1 per page to type their papers for them. I had learned how to type in seventh grade, so typing (and later word-processing) my high school, undergraduate and graduate papers came naturally to me. Over the years, word processing must have saved me hundreds of hours of work. For example, after my thesis defense, during which my thesis committee passed me, but asked me to add some commentary to one section and move one paragraph to a different chapter, I went home, made their requested changes, reprinted my entire thesis, and delivered it back to the head of the committee within one hour.
Nowadays, the 8GB flash drive that I carry on my keychain has more than 2 million times the RAM that was in the first home computer that I ever used, and it’s more than 1600 times the size of the first hard drives that I installed into administrative IBM PCs at a university in the Frostbite State.
What I’m trying to say is that I’m getting really old.
No, wait — that’s not what I’m trying to say at all — revealing my longevity is just an unintended consequence of describing my computer past. KInd of like the way that people’s first names often clue you in about how old they are — if you hear about a woman named “Edna” or a man named “Edgar,” you immediately know that they’re probably not Gen Xers.
If you’re old enough to remember the birth of “the microcomputer age,” or if you’d like to see how far personal computer technology has come in the past 30 years, you’re going to enjoy a stroll down memory lane (pun intended) at Old Computers.
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Hardware, History, Images, Internet, Microsoft, Technology