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A David Haines
Production for HainesUK
In association
with The Mini Fund
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A Sad
Forty-something's memories
I really thought that teaching the children to use
computers was a good idea. At four years old the boys could change 5.25"
floppy disks (remember those?) and start-up their games. Now the boys are 14 -
they've just graduated to publishing web pages and I haven't .... so I have to
play catch-up and learn to do it too!
In theory I'm still the family computer expert, but the
truth is I peaked with DOS 6.21 and Windows 3.11 (about which I knew
considerably more than my employer's IT department). Since then Window 95,
Windows NT, Windows 98 and Windows ME have progressively passed me by and it's
been all downhill. Whatever happened to that friendly DOS prompt???
So, here are a few recollections of a sad old computer
user:
 | I first used a computer at school. The computer terminal was
shared between three local schools, we had it from Tuesday morning (when it
arrived in the back of an estate car) until Wednesday lunchtime.
It connected via a phone line using a rotary dial telephone and an acoustic
coupler to the mainframe computer owned by the local council. |
| At University the computer terminals were a little
smaller but equally unhelpful. To log on you typed "CTRL Q Q" and
hoped. If you were lucky it replied "$" but then you were on your
own. |
| When I started work the computers started to get a
little smarter. Anybody remember the HP9845? We really splashed out and had
one with two cassette tape drives and 25k of RAM. Later we had an external
floppy disk drive that took 8" (yes, 8") floppy disks, each of
which could store a massive 256kByte of data. I was the first person in our
office to fill one up with real data. |
| Then came the PC. Or to be precise, the IBM PC with two
5.25" floppy drives, romantically named "A:" and
"B:", and a few tens of kBytes of RAM. That was followed by the AT
(Advanced Technology) and the XT (Extended Technology, which goes to show
that Americans can't spell). Somewhere along the line a hard disk was added,
and given the equally romantic name "C:" |
| I resisted buying a PC myself until they had definitely
come of age and really weren't going to get any better. My first PC
purchased in 1989 cost over £2,000 and had a 286 processor, a massive
20MByte hard disc, 640 kBytes of RAM and a 5.25" floppy drive. That was
it - PCs were never going to get better than this and my £2,000 investment was going to last a lifetime...... |
| There are now five computers in our house. Every
couple of years I buy a new one and they all move one step down the food
chain. My eight year old daughter has the oldest one in her room. |
And now, some predictions for the future:
| Hard disc capacity will continue to double every year.
The 60 GByte hard drives my employers use today will have grown to 1 TByte by
early 2005, or 1 PByte by 2015. |
| Long pause of several days there, while the computer
failed and refused completely to boot. I eventually tracked the fault down
to a failed sound card shorting the power supply, but I had to take the
whole thing apart before discovering that. I now know something about PC
hardware and have saved myself another £1,000. Back to the predictions.... |
| Home Area Networks will become the norm. All five
computers, both printers, and all four televisions in our house will be
networked using the multi-TByte hard drive in the newest computer as a
video, audio & data server and as a gateway to the internet via an
always-on broadband link. |
| With video bandwidth reducing, it will soon be possible
to store every television programme and every piece of web content ever
created on the Home Area Network server. |
| Cables will be a thing of the past. Bluetooth and then
its successors will ensure that every device talks to every other device
without having to crawl around the back of the box in search of the right
socket for the right cable. |
Which just leaves the sponsorship opportunity. Is there
anybody out there interested in sponsoring our Home Area Network, our TByte
server, and the multi-million-man-months that I'm sure will be needed to make it
all work?
Here's the email address: philip@hainesuk.com
or visit Hollycroft Associates.com
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