My ball-point pen gave up the ghost just as I was signing my name on a document. Isn’t it always the case that the ink runs dry at times like this? Did you ever wonder just how long the line would be if you drew it with a ball-point pen? A few hundred yards? Maybe a half mile? A mile? That’s a lot of ink in such a small holder but it may be possible. I used to wonder how they could lay telephone cables across the ocean from a ship. How could such a vessel hold that much cable? They do! Many things like this have triggered thoughts in my head about how things are accomplished when they seem at first hand to be impossible. Progress is made every day. My very first computer was a Commodore Vic20. It had a three and a half kilobyte memory which could be expanded to almost twenty kilobytes using a plug-in card! Yes, I said kilobyte! After a very short time I bought the Commodore 64 which had thirty-nine kilobytes of usable RAM. Wow! To think that these early machines were only as powerful as an average debit card of today! Computers these days are being produced with Terabyte-sized memories but the amazing thing is that the memory chips themselves seem to be getting smaller despite their capacities getting larger. Did you ever wonder how small a size can be achieved or how large a memory will be installed in future machines? Today’s world has become very much reliant on computers which in turn rely upon electrical power and we as human beings have or are becoming reliant more and more on the same things. Very little that is done in our modern society is done without the involvement and use of electrical and computing power. I wonder if mankind would survive without the technology that has sprung up around us and made our lives far easier to live out. Did you ever wonder what the future holds for us, what things might be like in say 100 years time? We can only imagine. I couldn’t tell you what tomorrow may bring never mind what will happen in a hundred years.
Shirley Anne
