Data Processing's Exponential Expansion in Our Lifetimes - What Do You Think About It?
The communication and outreach we do here at WA and on our websites would have been impossible when I was a child born in 1942 or even when I got my first Kaypro 2 personal computer in the early 1980s.. But I almost never think about how much things have changed. With the recent posts several people have written about gratitude, here is a biggie for all of us to be grateful for.
It only popped into my mind today because I've been reading a little history of how computers went from being huge things that ran on radio vaquum tubes that overheated and used so much power that they often burned out. Ever hear of ENIAC? It was created after World War II and the initials stood for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Calculator. It became a dinosaur pretty quickly.
After ENIAC, along came the invention of the transistor, probably before many of you here were even born. It led to the development of integrated-circuit technology, and I'm not going to try to describe in technical terms what that did. You could find articles online easily enough.
Today my mind is blown by how much we regular people -- not ourselves engineers or techies, for the most part -- have had our lives changed by all this.
Computers, cellphones, ever more creativity and communication... I for one am grateful to live in these times. The amount of data that our everyday devices can store is astronomical.
What do you think about all this?
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Pros and cons. I love having information at my fingertips or being able to make a call from anywhere! However, technology has it's disadvantages as well. People don't connect as much, kids don't go out to play as much, too much emphasis on social media etc.
One thing I DO know for sure is that I'm so VERY glad that none of this was available when I was a teen. I couldn't have lied to my mom (yeah, I know-sorry, mom) and gotten away with it.
~Debbi
It is mind-boggling when you think about it. Technology continues to evolve exponentially with certain items getting continually smaller, faster and less 'power-hungry' as the months go by.
I am also glad to be part of this ongoing technological revolution.
I remember my first school collecting newspapers to raise money for their very first video player, I think it cost in the region of £450 back then (circa 1972). Thirteen years later I saw my first 'mobile' phone which resembled a car battery with a Bakelite phone plonked on top.
Now the children's phones are more powerful than my desktop PC. That said, somethings have merely been improved upon, with the principle remaining the same, like the internal combustion engine which first appeared in the 1870's.
But the thing that I always think is that it is just an improvement on someone else's improvement that has got us here. If early man hadn't invented a wheel we'd have none of this!! That blows my mind every time!
The cheapest smartphone you can buy today is literally hundreds to thousands of times more powerful than the very first IBM mainframe that NASA used to get to the moon.
Today, people harness all this power for the most mundane things, like the post I am currently typing.
The more “user friendly” these devices became, the more difficult it seems to get to drill down through the GUI to compute something more complex than a simple arithmetic function. 😊
It's a crying shame that all that advanced technology is being wasted on 'Meme's' and pictures of someone's breakfast or cat.
Yes very true! I was born in 1950, I am still great health compared to many of my friends my age because how much knowledge we have gained not only in electronic advancements but dna and what we know about the human body and how it works .
We can benefit from all these things if we accept their advantages.
As a young boy I remember our neighbor who was like a god because he was a tv repairman.
My brother who was 4 yrs older than me learned how to fix radios and tv's .
How they went from tube to resistors. The first sony transistor radio and yet I wonder how much farther we would have been or could have been if Tesla could have put some of his amazing ideas of flying vehicles by anti gravity and how he invented wireless transmission and the radio not Marconi.
I only hope to live long enough to see more fantastic inventions come to fruition hopefully without politics and big business getting in the way.
Stay safe ! All the best Rosana😎👌
Enjoyed the details of your memory.
There could be fantastic things coming to fruition that we don't even know about!
Most technological advances eventually filter down the consumer in one way or another. 'The first computer I ever bought was a Packard-Bell 386 with Windows 3.1. I paid $1300. If it still exists it might be in museum. The last computer i bought a year ago is an HP laptop for $450. My phone is a more powerful comouter than the one on Appolo 11 that got men to the moon and back Can you believe it's been 51 years since that moon trip?
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I agree. I remember in the 1980's when i had my first personal computer, the Commodore 64 which has 64K of RAM and had games in cassette tapes which took half an hour to load and even then didn't load properly and one had to reload them again 😂
How things have changed since then! That i am certainly grateful for.