On occasion I find myself looking at old computers on the Internet, and wonder what it would be like to live back in those times with a DOS computer or a Commodore 64. I have looked back farther than that, and there are some really interesting computers, that filled entire rooms. That’s mainly because they were using vacuum tubes instead of transistors. Current processors use 200 Million+ transistors each. That’s a lot, it’s no wonder vacuum tubes took entire buildings to make such a slow processor. Vacuum tubes are big and bulky, and they died rather easily.
The invention of the transistor in 1947 changed things forever. Right now it’s more of a “how small can we make the transistors”. Well they’re making them super small, seeing as they can fit 4 processor cores or more on a single chip. I find all this very impressive. We’ve come a long way with processors, but still have a long way to go. There’s no telling what computers and processors will be able to do in the future.
I for one am glad to be alive and able to witness some of the advancements. My first computer had about 233MHz and Windows 95. At the time, it was supposed to be a “top of the line” computer gaming system. That was when I was 6 or 7, and I’m still young at only 18 and guess what I’m running a quad core processor with 2.4 GHz power on each core with 4GB of memory. Quite astounding the advancement in such a short period of time.
When I was born, the Internet was just getting started. Didn’t even quite form yet, and look at it now. It’s enormous, and growing every day. This is what makes me happy to be alive, technology is almost my life force. Without computers, I guess I’d be tinkering with radios or printers. Printing machines used to be enormous and required some one with quite a lot of knowledge to maintain them.
Anyway that’s my rant for today. You bet I’m a technology geek, and I’m proud of it.
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Tags: advancements, new technology, old computers, old technology
In those days, a bug was quite literally an insect that shorted out some wiring, causing miscalculation and downtime… Crazy thing is that today’s top of the line machines are actually three or four generations behind what the lab guys are working on right now.
Yea, technology is insane.