The (not so) good old days

Every once in a while, I can compare notes with someone who has been around computing almost as long as I have. I very rarely run across anyone who has been around it longer than me any more. Chatting about the way things used to be is less a case of nostalgia and more a case of wonder at the changes. The first computer I was exposed to took up most of a room and wasn't even a tenth as powerful as your phone.

Truth is, the good old days kind of sucked. You can plug a USB stick the size of your thumb into your laptop and carry around billions of characters of information. We had to thread 10 inch reels of magnetic tape to carry around a few hundred thousand characters. Your laptop hard drive holds hundreds of billions of bytes. We had a stack of serving tray sized platters that we dropped into something that looked like a washing machine to hold less than a million bytes. Your computer's memory holds tens of billions of bits on chips the size of your thumbnail. Our computer's memory was made of little iron donuts the size of your index fingernail that each held one bit. You type on your pad or laptop and your words go directly where you want them. Facebook, the novel you are writing using Word, this blog. We had to type on a terminal with keys that looked like thimbles and sounded like a noisy sewing machine. The words were holes punched into long strips of paper or index cards that we had to feed to the computer. You have a backspace key for your boo boos. We had to start over.

We would never even have conceived of things like laptops or smartphones or even desktop computers. It was unthinkable for an individual to own a whole computer. Connecting computers together so they could communicate with each other was science fiction. This new thing called, "The Internet" was an experiment in a government lab (yes, kiddies, the internet has been around for over 40 years).

I don't have even a little bit of nostalgia for those days. I think it is extremely cool to have been around to watch the journey. I can hardly wait to see what will happen over the next 40 years.