Thursday, August 25, 2005

Musings on the 10 year anniversary of Windows 95

Yesterday Windows 95 turned 10 years old. Remember the Start me up commercials? Or the Weezer Video on the CD...What's with these homies dissing my girl..? Wow...I've been doing this crap for a long time...I still remember how excited I was about dos 2.1! I remember my first "PC" was a Radio Shack Model 3 CPM. It had 8 inch floppy drives. It was my brothers who gave it to me when he got the "portable" version which weighed about 80 pounds and looked like a large suitcase and had a 4 inch green screen. It was called a Model 3p and had 5 1/4" Floppy drives. Then they came out with the cassette player to back these babies up and store data and load programs..whew..1/2 hour to load a program. Finally I remember the first hard disk for the Model 3's it was a whopping 5 megabytes and was about the size of an IBM PC. It weighed over 90 pounds! Now the standard size of drives is hitting 200 gigabytes, or 40 times that! A gigabyte was huge for a Windows 95 PC...now you can't even load your OS (windows XP) unless you have at least 3 or 4 gigabytes, and the standard size drives are getting into the 100's of gigabytes. (don't even get me started about back when I had to program fortran on punch cards and wait an hour for my results after feeding them into the mainframe at Ohio U)

I can only envision the OS and PC of tommorow. I suspect they will somehow tap into our brains which can store endless data and be the size of our fingernail (or even be our fingernail)
We will all become droids like Data from Star Trek TNG. Change a chip..learn a new task.

Gotta run to meeting