Computers and me.

In the early 60's, I was working for an office temp agency when they sent me to an assignment at an IBM facility in southern California.  Right across the hallway from where I was typing some statistical documents, there was a glass wall.  Behind the glass wall were rows of mainframe computer banks.  It was like something out of a 50's movie when I think back on it.  The computers ran large reels of tapes and the men who went in and out wore white lab coats.  I was fascinated, but there was nothing there to make me think that I would ever have a "computer" in my living room.

In the late 60's, I worked in inventory control and management at a company in Dallas, Texas.  One of my jobs was typing inventory needs on a machine that looked like a teletype machine.  This machine punched out holes in a tape which I would feed into another machine that looked and acted like a huge fax machine.  I was told that the data from the tape was being sent to a computer in Pittsburgh.  That was also amazing to me.

By 1980, I knew that personal computers had arrived and I was dying to get one when K-Mart had a sale on the Vic 20.  The Vic 20 was a little computer that had to be connected to a TV monitor.  I've been told that not many people remember the blue screen with white text.  The Vic 20 ran on 3 kilobytes of memory: compare that to the 96 megabytes (very roughly 96 million bytes) I'm using now!  That's about 32,000 times as much, if my math is right.)  My new "personal computer" had no hard drive or floppy drive, so every program had to be manually typed in until one of my wonderful sons got me a cassette recorder as a Mother's Day gift.  The tape drive could be plugged into the Vic and used regular audio cassette tapes for storing the programs.  The operating system was a non-programmable chip with the BASIC programming language.  BASIC is the acronym for Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, as quoted from Webster's online dictionary.  According to "whatis.com" at "http://whatis.techtarget.com/", BASIC is "an early programming language that is still among the simplest and most popular of programming languages.  Originally designed as an interactive mainframe timesharing language by John Kemeney and Thomas Kurtz in 1963, it became widely used on personal computers everywhere."  It is not the same as Visual Basic, although Visual Basic is built on the same language, but with "objects", which are blocks of code referred to by name rather than written out longhand.  The Vic 20 came with a book that contained the basic information on BASIC.  I pored over the book, got more information from the public library; I was hooked.

In the late 80's, Sears had a sale on word processors. Having been a wannabe writer for years, I got one.  It had no hard drive, but it had a floppy drive just a tiny bit larger than the 3.5" floppies that you are familiar with.  The Amstrad word processor ran on the CP/M language.  Written by Gary Kildall, CP/M stands for Control Program for Microcomputers (or Control Program for Microprocessors, or Control Program/Monitor, depending on which book you read).  I didn't know it at the time, but Gary Kildall had already lost the bid to get IBM's sponsorship of his operating system to Bill Gates, who had developed a similar operation system called DOS (Disc Operating System.)  Once again, I found myself fascinated with the operating system as much as with the word processing abilities of my Amstrad. More books from the public library.  I began to learn what machine language was, and compilers and I even tried to manually decipher some of the hieroglyphics I saw when I learned how to do hex dump.  That was a waste of many sleepless nights!

Along came the 90's.  I got a "Windowed" computer.  It had little pictures I could click on, instead of typing in cryptic words and phrases on a command line in front of a black screen.  If I made a typo in DOS, the thing just sat there and blinked at me or said nasty things like "syntax error."  A windowed computer had little pictures which represented all kinds of things, from programs to files.  It was called a "GUI" or Graphical User Interface.  It was kind of scary because instead of expecting me to tell it precisely what I wanted, it only gave me choices comprised of its own understanding.  Once I got past the initial shock of not being entirely in the driver's seat, I only had to figure out how to use the "mouse" (I'm sure there's a reason it was given that name.)  I gripped the mouse and steered erratically until I finally mastered it.  It was like learning to back up a car with a utility trailer behind it.  The computer I had bought was a Zenith AT-compatible with a 386 CPU and Windows version 3.0.  I soon found that 3.0 was obsolete and all programs were written for 3.1 by the time I got my computer.  So I "upgraded" to Windows 3.1 within a few weeks.  Then I learned I was operating on "minimal" memory requirements with one megabyte of memory, so I bought one more.  Between 1994 and 1995, I added memory to the motherboard, to the video card, upgraded to a faster modem, added a cd-rom drive, sound card, and speakers.  I soon learned to stay slightly behind rather than in front of the new technology.  Technology gets cheaper as fast as new cars depreciate.  It's been about two or three years now since I've done any major upgrades.

Now we're in thefourth year of a whole new millenium - 2003.  A year ago, I noticed that 128 Megabytes of memory cost less than my first one-megabyte upgrade!  Last week, I notice that 256 Megabytes is about one fourth of what 128 MB was last year.  And I've only got 96 Megabytes now, so I'm thinking...hmmm, maybe I do need some more memory, after all.  Of course, I also noticed that a 1.8 GIGAHERTZ processor is soooo cheap, I might as well get one.  And then I'll need a newer, faster motherboard for that processor.  Well, I guess you could say I feel an upgrade coming on.

Last updated on:  June 25, 2003