Did you ever wonder?
Posted by Shirley Anne on August 22, 2010
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
Emily said
How fun… I started off on a Vic 20, too, and it was amazing how much one could do in that 3.5kB of RAM. I remember how much an upgrade it was when I got the 16kB RAM expansion, something which would dwarf a modern smartphone in size. Now, my phone has 32GB storage space, my notebook has 4GB RAM and 500GB storage space… Things have moved on so far that it’s not even comparable anymore; it’s real paradigm-changing stuff!
That said, we managed before 500GB hard disks, the internet, mobile phones and iPads but I’d not like to go back to those times. Having had an email address since 1989ish I guess I grew up with that connectivity and would suffer having to go back!
Shirley Anne said
Hi Emily. Yes I have to admit to at least being a fan of email but I’m not so sure about the rest. I suppose you could say I’m a bit of a Luddite in some respects….LOL
Shirley Anne xxx