Computer Technology at Ken's House I was just thinking back to about forty-five years ago and was trying to figure out how far computers have come since then. It was about forty-five years ago that I took computer science in college. The only machines available were terminals that were connected to a huge main frame that had less power than my home computer today. We had to create programs by punching out cards and putting them in a reader that would transfer the data to the main frame to execute. If you think it is hard to write a computer program today, you should have been around then. There were so many people that needed to get to terminals in the school and so few terminals that computer time was at a premium and very hard to acquire. What was really frustrating was when you finally did get computer time and there was something wrong with your program, you had to get off the computer and go through your punch cards and try and find the error. This required you to go through the whole procedure again. About the same time, I saw an ad for a home computer, it was a Sinclair and the price was only $149 at the time. I couldn't believe it and sent away for it immediately. When the mailman knocked at the door with my package, I eagerly accepted it and went inside and tore the box open. My heart stopped! The machine was not what I expected. It was very small with a membrane keyboard and had only a 1,000-byte memory. There really wasn't much you could do with it. I was able to create a clock program but I only had enough memory to give the clock a single hand. I played with my Sinclair from time to time but was never able to do anything serious with it. In 1982 the Commodore 64 computer came out. I had purchased other computers before this one such as the Texas Instrument TI/49A, a cute personal computer which had sprites (little programmable hardware objects) and I believe 12,000 bytes of memory, if I remember correctly. I also had a clone of an early apple computer, but the Commodore 64 blew them all away. Here was a machine that had 64,000 bytes of memory. That was as much as the GM computer that did the payroll for the auto workers. It was unbelievable. It ran games and office programs though your word processor screen was only 40 characters wide. This was a quantum leap forward and it was relatively cheap. This was one of the most popular computers ever created and was produced from 1982 to 1993. Over 30,000,000 were produced. The machine also contained a fantastic audio system for the time. The price for the machine was $595 when it first came out, but this dropped way down over the years. In 1985 I purchased a computer that was so far ahead on the technology scale, compared to anything else available, I couldn't believe it. I am sure some people thought it was alien technology that had made it possible, but the truth was that a genius named Jay Miner had designed the world's greatest game machine and decided to make it into a home computer. This was the world's first truly multitasking computer. It was the Amiga 1000. This machine could do anything. It came with 256,000 bytes of memory and could be expanded by that amount again. This was vast in those days. It had an easy to use graphic user interface and tons of programs began to come out for it. It ran in beautiful color while most other machines were trudging along with black and white displays. It wasn't long before other models came out that had faster processors. The powers that be at Amiga decided this machine would be made in two versions, one for the home that had limited expandability and one for the office with full expandability. This didn't work however as third-party hardware manufactures always figured out how to make hardware for the smaller machine that ran the same as attachments for the larger machine. The next version of the Amiga I purchased was the Amiga 500, the home version of the Amiga 2000. I purchased it in 1987. It ran at a speed of 7 Megahertz and came with 512,000 bytes of memory. There was no hard drive, but if you had about $10,000, you could attach one. It served me well, but a few years later a faster Amiga 1200 was released which was the home version of the new Amiga 4000. I purchased the Amiga 1200 around 1993. It had a faster processor that was a Motorola 68020 while the Amiga 500 had a Motorola 68000 processor. The processor was upgradeable to even a Motorola 68060 which many claim was faster than a Pentium 130. I used this machine for many years until it became totally obsolete. The next machine I acquired had an early AMD chip in it and ran at 300 khz. I forget the brand, but I had it for a couple of years and ran Windows 98 on it. It crashed a lot. I had decided to upgrade some of the parts only to find out that the computer had been built in such a way the case blocked some parts and couldn't be opened. I would have had to tear the case apart to add or replace a DVD player for example. I was able to update the CPU (Central Processing Unit) and eventually got it up to a 450 khz machine. The machine was capable. The next computer I acquired, I built. The AMD 1 Mhz had just come out and I was determined to build a computer around it. The machine was built and I loved it. This was not anywhere as big an advance that the Amiga was to the machines before it, but it was nice. After a couple of years, I sent the machine to my son. As machines were getting faster, I built a machine around an AMD 2800+ CPU about seventeen years ago (late 2002 I believe). This was my main machine for running About Facts Net, my previous website and I never had any trouble with it except for a virus that got on it once. This machine was not an advance in the technical sense but was faster, much faster and thus cut down my backup times for the web site. When the new dual core AMD chips came out, I knew this was just what I was looking for and I determined I would build a new dual core machine. This would allow me to do other chores on the machine while I was doing backups and scans plus the machine was much faster. When I priced all the parts that I wanted, I found that I could buy a Gateway GT5032 for much less. I purchased the machine on sale for only $700 in March 2006. It had a dual core 4200+ CPU, a 250 Gig Hard Drive, 1 gig memory, 2-layer DVD burner and a second DVD player, a TV card, integrated sound and graphics, 2005 Multimedia center software with remote control and ran Windows XP Professional. I had to add a video card as the integrated graphics were too slow for my liking. It came with good speakers, a microphone, an FM antenna, optical mouse and nice keyboard along with an infra-red receiver for the remote control and built in 9 in 1 memory card reader. This was truly an advance. I could burn full DVDs in about 4 minutes and the media center was incredible at the time. You could look at live TV and run it back if you wanted to see something again. You could record TV for later viewing or look at slide shows of your photos in the media center. Want to listen to radio? You could hook up the FM antenna and away you go. This was a great computer and it was a great price. I had to go to the AMD site and get the newest driver for the AMD 4200+ chip. Yes, that's right, the CPU has a driver. The second thing I had to do was go to the Microsoft site and update the Media Center software. Before I did that, the recorded TV programs would freeze after about 30 minutes and the TV picture would jump. I am sure there were a lot of returns on this computer because people thought it was defective. So here I am now, several computers later. There has not been much advance in the clock speeds of CPUs, and manufacturers have taken a different direction. They have increased the number of cores and streams in a CPU chip. This is good in some ways but not helpful in others. To take advantage of the increase in cores a program has to be able to be broken into parts which the cores can process. Not many pieces of software are programmed to do this. It is said all Microsoft software can. I am running a sixteen-core machine today with 32 gigs of memory. It runs on an AMD chip and has large capacity disk drives, a decent video card, nice sound, a card reader, one solid state drive for Windows 10, Microsoft's best keyboard and a great mouse. There are also two 28-inch monitors. I still prefer to use a wired connection to the internet, but I do have a wireless printer connection. When I got the machine, it was a beast and had the most cores I could get, but a couple of months down the road AMD released a CPU with double the number of cores and streams, still I really don't need anything more at the moment.
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