17 March 2010

I was driving my bus through rural south Lincolnshire today enjoying the early Spring sunshine. After what seems like a very long and cold winter it is delightful so see the daffodils just waiting to burst into bloom and carpet the verges in that beautiful yellow hue.

One of the other great things about bus driving in through the villages is that the majority of the time traffic is light so one gets the chance to think about all sorts of things. The main thing that is really on my mind at the moment is John Thornhill’s Masterclass which has now reached week 7. Can’t believe the time is flying by so fast but the course is so good and very compelling. We have covered a lot of topics already and things are looking up because I have now been accepted for Google Adsense at the 2nd attempt.

Anyway I digress. Today I was thinking about my working life and all the changes I have seen since I started work at the tender age of 17 in September 1975. That was the same month IBM launched their first portable computer. The IBM 5100 weighed in at 55 pounds and cost the best part of $20K. Having spent a couple of years at Hackney council followed by 5 years as a computer programmer at British Gas I embarked on my career in the new age of PCs. In 1983 Commodore & Apple were being challenged by the “new kid on the block”; the IBM and IBM compatible PCs were hitting the market using the Intel 8088 processor. Soon after that the first PCs appeared with a built in hard disk drive. This was cutting edge; a whole 10 megabytes of storage capacity on a disk drive. We could now actually store applications on the computer rather than have to load from a floppy disk each time. ACT introduced the Sirius which had 128Kb RAM.

The monochrome display might even be replaced by colour at some time! Wouldn’t it be great to be able to have more than 1 task running at the same time?

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