As I watched Modern Marvels on the History Channel this morning I was reminded of some of the incredible advances in technology that I take for granted every day that have just appeared in the past couple of decades.For instance, in the very early 80's I recall going down to Macy's at Valley Fair with Ralph to purchase Atari 800 home computers for each of us. I had to type in lines of BASIC code to run programs and connect a tape drive to it (just exactly like an audio tape recorder) in order to save these programs to use again. The 5.25 inch floppy disc drive cost almost as much as the computer so that had to come much later. Then came the second floppy, the thermal printer, more memory, upgrade to the Atari 800XL, the Atari ST, 10MB external hard drive, a Packard Bell 286 PC, followed by 386, 486, Pentium I, Pentium II, Pentium III desktops, Dell laptops, HP laptops... all the way up to the system I sit at today which has essentially four processors running 3GB of RAM along with 640GB of hard disk space (compare that to the 10MB hard drive I bought back in the mid - 80's for almost as much as my entire system cost last year).
How about any of these everyday devices? CD player, laser disc player, Palm Pilot, DVD player, VCR, CD recorder, DVD recorder, digital camera, camcorder, cell phone, desktop printer, LCD televsion, IPOD, - all of these have been created in my lifetime and I have at various times at least one of each. The first digital camera I remember using was a Kodak SLR with a hard drive back that had to be connected to a SCSI card installed in a computer - the camera and card ran around $10,000 when it first appeared and we had one at Applied. We also had one of the first CD recorders on the market. I still have the very first CD I created back more than 18 years ago from that system. It has held up much better than any tape I have!The main tasks that I always wanted to be able to do at home on any system I had was to create and edit video. This always seemed to be one generation of equipment away from what I could afford - until the turn of the century. Around the year 2000 I finally obtained the proper combination of software tools and hardware that allowed for full screen video input and output. This included the camcorder I still use today. I was one of the first students in my video class at West Valley to be able to edit my assignments on a computer. Now desktop video is commonplace - Windows these days even comes with software installed to make and output video.
Next time: getting online in the early days, dial tones, acoustic cups and AOL ...
5 comments:
Great, Jamey! Boy, talk about nostalgia! Of course my nostalgia pretty well stops at the point you got your Atari ST--and the 10MB hard drive, that came a loooong time after the Atari 800 for me. But the whole thing has been--and still is--an interesting ride. I am eternally grateful to you (and John Beaver) for getting me started in computers, and being so patient with my ongoing confusion.
Looking forward to your "getting on-line in the early days."
Wow. That's a lot of numbers and abbreviations in that second paragraph. How much was your first computer anyway?
I have always been thankful that I grew up in a house where I could experience the latest and greatest of technology. It's amazing how much things have changed even in my lifetime.
Wow! Hard to believe all this stuff has only been around in our lifetimes. The next generation will be so used to this stuff they won't even need to think about it.
I ran across an article a couple weeks ago about someone who had found an acoustic coupler modem from 1964, managed to hook it up to his modern PC, and it worked! It was 300 baud, but it worked.
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