Changing Technology
By Mark Williamson
How things have changed since Blaise Pascal built the original digital computer in the 17th century. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that electronic computers came into being. Enaic was one of the early computers and it was blazingly fast. It could complete 5 machine cycles in a second with 10 bits of data. 3.6 x 10 to the power or 9 x 64 bits. Enaic on the other hand weighed more than 50,000 pounds and used 175 kilowatts of power. That is a difference in computing power of 46,080,000,000 times. Enaic was high maintenance also, blowing electron tubes daily and having to rework relay contactors. It cost about 6 million dollars in todays economy. The cost of maintenance exceeded that.
In the mid 1940’s the cell phone was developed and it would take up the better part of a large trunk of your car. In 1972 Motorola came up with the first hand held mobile phone and today they just keep getting smaller and faster with so many added features. Even most of the simpler phones have more commuting power than Enaic.
I recall as a child hearing my voice recorded and played back on a wire recorder, before they had magnetic tape and optical discs wouldn’t be around for long while.
Most of you probably never use a rotary dial phone or ever used a computer that didn’t have a color display. My father sat with his siblings in the main room and watched the radio. They didn’t have television then. I can remember my first color TV.
My first portable computer was an Osborne Executive and it ran CP/M before there was DOS, before Mister Gates and MicroSoft or Apple.
Circuits get smaller, faster and features are added daily. We as a society are well short of what my dreams were as a child. I figured that by now interplanetary travel would be common place and people would have embedded electronics allowing them to share thoughts and visions.
I had a friend that has now passed on that told me that the Wright brothers flew when he was in the first grade in school. I told Pinky, “I hope you live another 10 or 15 years.” He replied, “I don’t care if I die tomorrow but I sure would like to come back in about 50 years and see what has happened because you can’t start to imagine all the changes I’ve seen in my lifetime.” I know he was right. God Bless you Pinky.
I don’t know where technology will take us but for those of us to live on the bleeding edge, we are in for a wild ride.
Mark