Friday, March 29, 2013

I am a sucker for computer paraphernalia.  My first computer was a cobbled-together Japanese version of an Apple II+ that I bought in the Akihabara electronics district in Tokyo when we were stationed at Camp Zama in 1982.  I joined the computer club on post and was amazed by the club computer that could play the same games that the console models played in the arcades all over Japan.  With a little tutelage from some of the more experienced members, I bought my computer which did little else than run Applesoft Basic on our television.  The first real program I got was Apple Panic, a game that loaded from a cassette recorder into the computer’s 64 KB memory through the audio input, similar to the way an acoustic modem used to work.  5 1/4” floppy drives were the next addition.  The floppy disks held 100 kilobytes and cost about $4.00 a piece. They would hold a program on each side.  A few years before when I was in my residency at Ft. Benning, the wife of one of the dentists offered to “word-process” our research papers for us for $30, but I typed mine on an IBM Selectric in the office of the hospital clinic not really understanding the benefits of word processing.  When I got my own computer, I could word process by myself and I used the CPM version of Wordstar for many years after that. A green-screen monitor and then a 9” color monitor were the subsequent additions, followed by an Epson dot-matrix printer.  There was perhaps $2000 tied up in all that archaic equipment that by today’s standards was prehistoric.  I didn’t even have a hard drive until I junked my Apple in favor of an IBM compatible 386 machine in 1992.  I now sit surrounded by terabytes of storage, unfathomably fast computers, multi-gigabye thumb drives and digital everything, wireless this and Bluetooth that.  Processing speed, memory capacity, and pixels in digital cameras are increasing at exponential rates making what will exist in 10 years almost unimaginable.  We have reason to worry about many aspects of the future, but the changes we will see here can’t help but be exciting.