Looking Forward and Back

Looking Forward and Back was Originally Posted on January 4, 2006 by lavarock

I was in COSTCO before Christmas and see where there is a “keychain” memory card of 5-gigabytes! The capacity of these is really getting up there, but you need to put this into perspective.

My last blog mentioned getting rid of the old. Let’s look at the old though.

One of my bosses used to have a computer in his basement. Oh I know that some of you are thinking of something running windows, maybe an old PC, but this was a Hewlett Packard 3000 Series II mainframe. The system was two equipment racks maybe 7 foot or so tall. Then there were two disk drives, which resembles small washing machines. The removable disk packs were cylinders resembling a stack of pancakes, separated from each other. This system was a timesharing system, capable of handling 50 or more simultaneous users (assuming we had that many modems) and each user could be running different applications. The system required three-phase power and it had to be specifically run through the neighborhood and into the house. Three-phase power would normally be found in industrial parks and not a home. The reason the system was in his basement is classified, but suffice it to say, he did Government work and wanted a short commute.

So this system, which needed air conditioning and rarely was shut down and could handle many simultaneous users and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and ran all sorts of graphics and accounting programs, this system came with 256 kilobytes of memory and 50 megabytes of hard drive disk! You have to understand these numbers. The main memory (soon upgraded to twice that amount) is smaller than the memory in a Caller-ID box, smaller than your cell phone, smaller by far than the memory contained in the smallest and cheapest digital camera you can find. As for the disk space, 50 mb is enough to store perhaps 25 digital photos!

Oh sure, over the years the systems like these grew and expanded by orders of magnitude, but it was in our recent past that computers took up a room and were made of vacuum tubes (think light bulbs) and were programmed by way of toggle switches. Initial computer storage for personal computers might be an audio tape recorder…

Now flash forward to that 5-gigabyte keychain memory module. It plugs into your USB slot and could hold maybe 2500 photos or 8 full-length movies. It could hold an operating system (or two) and many computers now allow you to boot from that keychain device!

A problem with laptops has always been that you had to be careful using them while they move. An example is that I think I destroyed a hard drive because I used it during a flight and we had air turbulence. With the new memory sticks, laptops can now use only steady state memory chips instead of using a mechanical disk! Some PDA and IPOD users already are familiar with this ability.

So we are converting from technologies. It is difficult to find computers, which still use floppy drives. I was never a fan of tape drives for storage and preferred to use CD and DVD’s to write data. It is pretty difficult to find VCR’s anymore and even LCD TV screens are the rage over a TV screen with a CRT screen.

Although you can buy a GPS (Global Positioning System) to show where in the world you are, you may already have one built into your cell phone.

Cell phones and Internet phones are replacing Hardwired telephones in your house. Our local phone company has been advertising that if you have their hardwired phone service and their cell phone service, that you can press a button and switch a call from the cell phone to the wired phone.

Movies can be streamed through the Internet rather than rented at a video store. The same can be said for radio stations and live video camera feeds as they wend their way live to your home or mobile unit.

We used to lose friends when they moved, now we can look them up on the search engines and see every address where they lived. We can use flat-rate calling plans to talk with them for hours. Yes, you may soon find yourself talking with someone who says you were best friends in nursery school and who has nothing better to do for the next 3 hours than to chat on the phone… “Hey, remember nap time? I never got to sleep because that girl next to me was such a crybaby and the constant whimpering kept me up. Oh and those graham crackers, THEY were the best! I always liked them with milk.” You think “Who IS this person?”

Speaking of Long Distance, it used to be a big deal to get a telephone call by long distance. Dinners would be interrupted; conversations were halted while the person hollered into the telephone, trying to be heard ½ way around the world or even ½ way across the state.

I remember when HBO started and I can tell you that they used to sign off at midnight. There were not enough viewers to stay up all night just to watch movies.

If I am reaching back, let be slip in this, for those who are too young to know. Your Grandparents or Great Grandparents may still have problems calling a refrigerator a refrigerator but rather call it an icebox. Many years ago we kept things cold in a refrigerator that used a block of ice for cooling food.

Airline stewardesses used to wear nurses uniforms and yes, they used to have real silver on airline flights and it used to be a big deal to fly across the ocean.

Just one lifetime ago, Hawaii had a Queen and before that, Kings.

Yet during the same period, while disk drives changed to memory chips, flying around the world became commonplace, countries were overthrown, electricity replaced ice, I can tell you that Kona Hawaii has been growing, roasting and shipping coffee with few changes. We still pick the beans by hand, carefully roast them and send them to discriminating coffee-lovers worldwide.

Some things NEVER change!

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