Meerkat Prompts: My First Computer
At the risk of carbon-dating myself, the first computer we had at my parents’ home would be classed as incredibly basic by modern standards, but then, computing is a field of technology that advances so quickly, you could have a laptop that’s three years old and it might well be obsolete.
I don’t recall exactly when a computer first appeared in the house. I want to say 1992, but it might have been later than that, possibly 1994. The original machine had a stocky monitor, akin to an old tube-style TV, mounted on top of the actual PC, which featured a 3.5″ floppy disc drive, and I think it had a CD-ROM drive too. The stats elude me, but I think it had no more than a 12 MB hard drive, and something like 4 MB of RAM (if that). There was no internet access – indeed, at that moment in time there was more or less no internet to speak of – so the PC was there for typing of documents, loading up a multi-media interactive encyclopedia that we had, and playing an early version of Sim City. The first ever operating system I used was Windows 3.1, to illustrate the age of the hardware.
Fast-forward to now, and the difference between the average PC then, and the average PC now represents one of the fastest, most exponential fields of growth of any technological field. The average processing speed of a computer core back then was between 33-50 MHZ. Now, it’s 4-6 GHZ, and modern PCs usually have multiple processors. The raw processing power can be nearly a thousand times greater than it was back then.
That’s not all. A PC in 1992 would have, at best, 8 MB of RAM. Nowadays, PCs have between 8 and 16 GB of RAM, anywhere from a 4000x increase, to an 8000x increase. Hard drive sizes have gone from 200 MB at best, to a minimum of 512 GB, and solid-state hard drives allow for much faster response times. In terms of pure space, that’s around 10,000 times more storage. Indeed, there are now USB memory sticks that far exceed what early PCs could hold.
There’s other changes too, some of which might not be seen as wins, but they reflect updates to technology. Floppy discs are confined to the distant past, and CD-ROM drives (which would evolve into CD rewriters and even DVD rewriters) are also virtually done and dusted. The advent of faster, greater storage, combined with the sheer bulk of these device readers, has rendered them obsolete. Another factor behind storage mechanisms has been the rise of the internet, and the arrival of cloud-based storage, making it incredibly easy to transfer information, without the need to carry around discs, CDs, and even the aforementioned USB memory sticks.
It’s all a far cry from having to load up discs to play Sim City! It’s also worth noting that this original machine was, as already alluded to, a stocky piece of hardware. Today I have a laptop, a thin, sleek piece of kit with a HD screen that greatly eclipses that original chunky monster.
What’s interesting is these steady advancements (on average, computer power doubles over 18-24 months) don’t automatically translate to observable performance. The improvements to hardware are met by increasingly sophisticated software, which offsets some of that obvious hardware advancement. We don’t – perhaps can’t – completely perceive increased processor speed, or responsive hard drives, due to that offset.
This isn’t to say that it’s not at times obvious. Comparing that early Sim City with modern games of the same genre (such as Cities Skylines) underscores how far computing technology has come. From fully-realised 3D environments to procedurally-generated NPCs that respond to the world around them, gaming in various forms showcases how rapidly we’ve developed these tools. Not only that, when you look at business software, some of what we have today would never work on the home PCs of the early 90s (think of the various CAD tools, which can now run on what is essentially a home PC of today). The Microsoft Office packages have greatly grown in their capabilities, again in no small part due to the incredible advances in the hardware.
Modern computing seems far removed from that first PC, yet the fundamentals are sort of the same. Keyboards maintain the same format. There is still a mouse, albeit the days of a roller ball (so often incapacitated by a little dust) are long-gone. There is familiarity, which is comforting. Whether or not computers will continue to have these traits in another 30 or so years… well, I guess we’ll find out!
‘Kat Comments