Look How Much the Computer Scene Has Changed

Just look at your computer. What is it? A desk top? A laptop?

The first computer I used required a room roughly half the size of of a basket ball court. The printer was nearly five feet tall and the size of an office desk. We were not allowed to touch the keyboard. The hard drive was probably 2 feet square and a foot tall.

That first one I used was dramatically smaller than the first electronic computer. The very first one required 5 city blocks and more electricity than the entire city of Denver.

Your computer case has one or more hard drives, a CD drive, the entire electronic computing system, the power supply and a cooling system all inside it. If it happens to be a laptop, it also contains a battery capable of running it for several hours. The battery can be recharged in an hour or so. There are phones available that have nearly as much computing ability as your computer.

Amazingly, this computer I have has greater power than that that first one I used. It is many times faster and much quieter. The line printer on the first machine I used printer 600 words per minute, an entire line at a time. If you were standing near the printer when it began to print, it sounded like a jack hammer.

My present printer will print 30 pages per minute without disturbing people across the room or distracting me sitting next to it. It can print both color and all shades of grey.
If it did not need to hold paper and toner, it would not need to be as large as it is.

Almost no programs were available to use the computer, so you had to learn a programming language to do anything. Debugging a program was immensely time consuming. Once you had the basic program working you would constantly find ways to make it more useful.

When the TRS-80 came out it had an amazing memory of 1K or 1000 bytes. Now we require gigabytes (1000000000 bytes) of memory to just operate the computer.

With all these improvements, you would think that prices would be far higher than they are, but in fact, computers are no higher than they were then, even ignoring inflation. If we take it into account, they are a great deal cheaper,

Programs are available to do nearly anything one wishes to do and are often very simple to use. While they require a lot of memory, they are well within the capabilities of most computers. In fact, It is a bigger problem to decide which program you will be satisfied with than to find one to do the job.

If one is willing to do a little research, both hardware and programming can be found that will be satisfactory for whatever you want to use the computer for. There are numerous websites providing information about the products available, so one does not need to buy and hope his purchase will turn out to be a good buy.

At this point, the most important thing is to decide what you presently need and perhaps guess at what you expect to need in the near future. Fortunately, most of the hardware is adaptable enough that a perfect guess is not critical. Questions asked before you buy save a great many headaches later. If you can, try software to get an idea what it does. What feels comfortable to you will be different than what someone else likes.

Which hardware will be best will depend on many factors. Too small a screen may be hard to read. An undersized keyboard may make typing difficult. Too large a laptop may be awkward to carry. How much memory you need can make a lot of difference in what you spend. Thinking about

Seed Newsvine

Bookmark this article in your preferred program

Comments

Add Comment

Popular Articles in this cathegory

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.