Contemplating the endlessly white space of the admin interface for adding a new post, I was struck by how far we’ve come in such a short time. I sit here wondering what to write to my hypothetical audience, with little regard for the technology and social progress that has enabled this most democratic (and authoritarian) of all platforms.
I got my first computer when I was 10 years old, and I’ve never been without one since. It was an IMB XT. A 086 Intel processor, with 640kb of RAM, and a monochrome green screen. It didn’t have a hard drive. It booted up off a 5.25 inch floppy disk that had MS-DOS 2.3 on it. There was no mouse, and certainly no internet. There wasn’t even a GUI. Once you booted up, the screen displayed the ominously green C:/>_ and waited for you to tell it what to do. And of course, what I did was play games. Well, that and write. With the incredible MultiMate word processor.
My first hard drive was the size of a brick, and it held 20Mb. Enough space that I didn’t have to keep changing floppy discs whenever I entered a new area in a game. (And people complain about load times today.) And my first video card was a 4-bit CGA card…after years of playing green games, I could finally play them in red, green and blue at varying intensities. How times have changed.
Progress, Progress, Progress
There’s no doubt that computing has been one of the fastest evolving fields of all time. It’s been nearly 30 years since the publication of Gibson’s Neuromancer, and although we’re not quite there yet, we’re certainly on the verge. Thanks, Moore’s Law.
Personally, I suspect the techies of the day read Gibson, and thought to themselves, “This is so damn cool…let’s make it.” Talk about life imitating art.
Regardless of how it happened, the fact that I can sit here near the southern tip of Africa and even contemplate writing something in a simple, relatively user-friendly interface on my screen, and only have to push a button to (potentially) make my very thoughts accessible to anybody, anywhere in the world is pretty damn amazing. As many others have no doubt realised before.
Still…it makes you think, doesn’t it? An entire global industry has sprung up almost overnight (relatively speaking), and thanks to it, here we all are. I wonder what tomorrow will bring?