I have been an avid system builder for the past 12 years. I started computing with Apple IIe, Commadore64, and Sanyo MBC 550. These computers were floppy disk units only – with the exception of the Commadore64 which was a cassette tape-drive. I purchased a used Leading Edge computer with a 10MB hard drive in the late 80′s. That was a tremendous boon since the floppy flip could be stopped, and the speed of program load was tremendous. Since these were all DOS only machines – no windowing software so 1 program at a time could be run- that was a significant performance boost.
I spent over $2,000 on a Leading Edge Intel 486-d 16 MHz system with a 100MB hard drive in the early 90′s. This amount of storage and having Windows 3.1 for Workgroups was another performance boost. A lighting strike killed that computer about 2 years after I purchased it, forcing me to purchase another – a Packard-Bell 100MHz Pentium with 8MB of RAM and a 1GB Hard drive. Wow, I would never use all that drive space!
Once I decided to upgrade to Windows 95 (at a very reasonable $95.00), I needed another 8MB of RAM ($120.00) which gave me a total of 16MB of RAM – adequate for running Win95. I quickly ran out of hard drive space, so I had to purchase a 2GB hard drive as a slave for $220.00. That system performed adequately for 6 years – our kids played educational games, I was on dial-up internet through Netscape and then AOL, and life was good.
Then, we purchased a second computer – an HP 750MHz Athalon XP system with a 30GB hard drive and Windows ME OS with a color monitor for around $850.00. Now, we had two systems, but only one phone line. We decided that the primary HP system that the kids had access to was our main system. I could use the 100MHz system only when the HP was not online, and, we were not using the telephone. This latter issue was a big deal given the cost of cellular minutes in the late 90′s and early 2000′s. Consequently, I did much computing late in the evening.
Very soon after the purchase of the HP, we began to purchase systems at around 1.5 per year. This ranged from a 600MHz Citrix chip-based system to 3GHz P4 dual core. These were Bare Bones systems purchased primarily through Tiger Direct and New Egg, and costing around $200 to fully build. Eventually, we were up to 6 running systems – 2 laptops, 1 server, 3 desktops.
In the years between the HP and today, we upgraded to Cable broadband. We had a 100KBit connection for a couple of years – which was adequate for 2-3 computers (mid 90′s), which is what we had at the time. Now, we have 1.5+ MBit connection that isn’t effected by any amount of network traffic (unless, we have 4 systems playing Hulu or streaming YouTube videos at the same time).
Future
The significance of the iPad and the recently talked-about Motorolla Droid based pad computer must not be underestimated. These are the computing platforms of the future – small, powerful, and transportable. The issues that will be overcome in the next couple of years include:
This increasingly mobile computing platform will be more and more integrated with everything we do. Work, play, socialization, financial transactions, and most other life-events will become computer-enhanced.
Some theorists are predicting implant technology within the next decade – something that will merge the human mind with the storage, retrieval, and processing of information in near-real-time. If we are able to think and receive direct sensory input from a computing device, how much longer before we are fully integrated into the ‘web’. Thought theft may be a new crime, particularly when some ideas are worth millions of dollars.
That point in time where computers or computer networks become self-aware – the so called ’singularity’, may not be as far off as we once thought. While the human brain may take another 100 years to replicate in a silicon-biological hybrid form factor, that may not be needed if we begin to feed our network with thought, emotion, dreams, and raw information on a regular basis. All that is required is an algorithm that ties everything together
