Friday, January 4, 2013

Freaky Friday

This era is considered The Golden Age in Science and Technology.

Having spent a lifetime in technology, I have seen things change more rapidly than I could ever have anticipated. I began my computer career before the Apple was ever invented. I was working at IBM when a prototype came across my desk. It was smaller than any computer I'd ever seen before, had 16KB (yes, KB) of memory and did not have a hard disk. You could do only one thing at a time - which consisted in the early years of word processing, spreadsheets, graphics and databases. The screen was green on black, not high resolution, and capable of displaying only 40 characters on each line - which meant you had to print your work to see how it would look.

Floppy disks were 5 inches - smaller than the 8 inch disks used with word processing machines such as the IBM Displaywriter.

In just the past few decades, I've witnessed computers held in my hand that have far surpassed what we could once do with mainframe computers that cost millions of dollars.

With that technology has come a lot of power - the power to reach people by phone around the world (even from Mt Everest), the power to take our destinies in our own hands and create cyber-corporations, the ability to tap into vast stores of data at our fingertips.

How has technology changed your world?