Modern Technology

Modern Technology is just amazing. I'm sitting at my dorky-looking homebuilt computer desk (so embarrassing I won't be posting any pictures of it) watching the NASA video of the current shuttle mission, listening in on the incredibly boring (to anyone but space/engineering geeks like me) radio transmission and watching as they take the bolts off the truss they're attaching to the International Space Station, all the while cruising several internet sites and typing on my blog.

This is so commonplace. It doesn't amaze anyone anymore. It's like being amazed that a cell phone can also take pictures.

But I grew up in the Seventies, watching the moon landings and the Skylab missions and the long, long build-up of the Shuttle, and all of this was just pie-in-the-sky science fiction dreaming back then. We knew there would be all this awesome technology, but we really weren't quite sure what it would be like, and because it was something we hadn't grown up with, it could never be "normal".

Remembering my absolute joy when my first 8080 microprocessor booted up with my very first program, after weeks and weeks of soldering and wiring and programming and staring at little red LEDs which let me know what was going on, it is impossible to feel blase about sitting in this little office with seven computers.

My 8080 ran at a blistering 2 mHz, resulting in something on the order of 500,000 instructions per second. My first Z-80 ran at 4 mHz, with an unbelievable 2 million instructions per second. My first 8086 ran at 8 mHz. The computers in my office range from 166 mHz to 2.6 gHz. That's well over a billion instructions per second!

(That doesn't answer the question of why Windows is still so slow, but we always move forward to meet the technology, straining our resources, so there is always room for improvement.)

The latest acquisition in the fast computer is a DVD writer. Now I can sit here and make backups of up to 8 gigabytes of my data (mostly photographs). Or create and distribute my own movies.

I can go to Target and buy a pack of 50 plastic disks that allow me to store 400 gigabytes of data.

Or I can purchase a little disk drive that allows me to read and write 500 gigabytes of data.

When all this computer technology started - for me, at least - there was no way to store data permanantly. The 8080 was attached to a 1,000-byte memory chip, but the data would disappear the moment power was removed. So all my programs had to be entered via a set of 25 switches on the front panel. Every time it was turned on.

The first game I wrote (in BASIC on the Math & Science Center mainframe) was stored on punch-tape. I still have the punch-tape, but there are no readers available now except in museums.

When Marc Montoni and I were using his TRS-80, we could write programs to a cassette tape drive, very slowly, but at least we didn't have to retype them every time.

In the electrical engineering lab in college, we used to play Ultima on the Apple IIe, and the game fit on a single 5-1/4 inch disk. What was that, 160kbytes?

Working at the insurance company during college, we stored our entire dBase II program and database on a 5 megabyte hard drive. And backed up to 8-inch floppies.

The first IBM XT we got had a 10 megabyte drive.

Now I have a 512 megabyte flash disk in my pocket. I've had it for three years; it's ancient history. One of my friends went to a seminar and they were giving away 1 gigabyte flash disks like they were key rings.

I'm still in awe.