Signal to Noise

I was having a discussion yesterday with a fellow who’s been in the technology business quite a bit longer than myself.  Though I wasn’t yet an accomplished “I.T. Guy” when he sold his first computer in 1983 (I was finishing the first grade), I do share a knowledge of the amazing chain of industrial events that led to modern computing as we know it today.  We talked about CP/M.  We talked about MS-DOS before directories were invented. We talked about punch cards and programming using banks of dip-switches.  We talked about computers before video interfaces.

His remark, as he looked across his desk at my iPhone, was that, for a few hundred bucks, any person can carry in his pocket the equivalent of thousands of the supercomputers of the seventies–giant dinosaurs that, even given entire city blocks in which to compute, would still not be as powerful as a modern cell phone due to their limited processor bandwidth and address resolution.

Round about 1984, my dad came home with a Timex Sinclair ZX81 personal computer, and we later adapted it using a home-built, metal-fabricated keyboard kit, to look something like a Commodore VIC-20.  That Sinclair was my first experience with personal computing.  Dad would write down short BASIC programs on a notepad, and I would type them in while he was at work at the U.S. Army tank plant in Detroit.  Of course, Dad knew what the programs would do–and I had no idea until I typed them in and ran them.

Occasionally, Dad would need to give me an assist with a syntax mistake. Hey, it’s tough for a six-year-old to know what a semicolon IS, let alone find it on the keyboard.  And the QWERTY concept was weird, too. I wondered why the keyboard wasn’t in alphabetical order.  But I digress.

People opine that my field is boring. This makes me chuckle.  Things have advanced so far, so fast, in my field of information techology, I can hardly wait to see what the next 25 years bring.