Technology - Phew

K, so I'm sitting here at my home office. I have 5 different screens going off of 4 different computers. And what I'm laughing at is that I'm actually using all of them at once! I feel like I'm 'Tank' in the Matrix. "Give me an exit, Tank".

What a long way technology has come. Here's a little story of my formative years - back, way back in history!

I was working at Hilblom (which is a whole nother story in itself). Anyway, I had my own CP-M system (yea, most of you reading this won't have any idea what this is) Think of it as a very limited DOS prompt -- you know, what you get when you open a command prompt in windows?

Anyway, at that time in history, we were working on 8 inch floppies. Oh, those were the 'drives' back then and they were almost paper thin, an 8 inch square and could hold a whopping 128K (that's right -- K. Before Gigabytes: GB, there was Megabytes: MB and before that there was K for Kilobytes. That's 1000 bytes or about 1000 characters). You laugh. But we had two drives so that made it twice as big! :p

I'd do my work and then save the file and there would be this satisfying buzz as the little floppy head cruised across the disk and saved all my hard work onto the magnetic media. It was even possible to watch the head move around across the surface. It was entertaining. You could start a save of a huge source file (like 200 lines even!) and it was like watching it go and place each bit in a carefully selected home on your floppy. Needless to say, it would take a few seconds (sometimes minutes) to save a file. Then when you went to compile the thing, you could go for coffee! (They should really consider going back to this format -- what a pleasant way to spend a morning!)

Ok, so, I'm working away at my program using 8 inch floppies. Then one day, the hardware engineer (I think his name was Kalid -- even back then, they were all from the middle east; not really sure why) So, Kalid comes up to me and informs me that I'm going to get a new "Hard Drive". It would be 5 Megabytes! "Holy crap! That's a lot of space. Think I'll ever use it all?"

Anyway, I was exited that I'd eventually get this brand new thing with so much space. It would mean I wouldn't have to swap floppies around anymore!

The big day came and Kalid (I think that was his name) installed the new drive in my computer. Wow. Well, at first there was nothing on it. So, my first mission was to put something on it! I grabbed one of my trusty 8 inch floppies. (Kalid had done his job and was now off to somewhere else to save their world).

Oh boy. Now to see what this sucker can do. I opened one of my big source files off my floppy, edited it and then I thought I'd save it to my new hard disk drive. "Save". Hey, the little light on the drive merely blinked at me! Wait a minute, something is wrong. Let me try another file. "save". Again, just a blink.

I called my friend Dave (who is, was and still is the best programmer the world has ever known). "Dave, I think there's something wrong. When I save my document, the drive only blinks. I don't hear any buzz or whirl or anything. And, it doesn't seem to be saving it."

Dave was very good. He could have laughed at me, made fun of me, ridiculed me, etc...

Instead he informed me that this is how these new drives work. They are 100's of times faster than the floppies.

I was amazed. How could something be both bigger AND faster than a floppy? Up to that moment in my life, things usually had a consequence. If you got something more of one, you had to give up another.

It was the most fantastic realization of my life. I was literally blown away.

Since then, there have been other times when I've experienced that same awe at technology.

The most recent was when I discovered that SSD drives were faster, cooler, quieter and won't die if you drop them.

It's rare when you absolutely get more/better everything.

This is why I enjoy technology.

Don't get me started on the downside. Namely, why is everything these days hard to use and buggy?

I'll leave that to another day.