Reminiscing

I had a computer when I was a high school student back in the Philippines in the late 80s. My parents were a bit indulgent as long as it would help with my education. On one of their trips to the U.S. they came back with an expensive treat, a brand spanking new Commodore Amiga 500 personal computer. When I opened the box, I was scared because I realized that I could not even use a regular typewriter without mangling the keys, what's more a personal computer with a soft keyboard and with programs that can be deleted accidentally. The computer was set up in my room and although I was sent to computer programming schools, the machine pretty much collected dust in my room because I was afraid to break it and get a sound beating. The only use it got from me was to type up my essays, reports and featured articles for the school paper or make banners for parties at home and at school with the attached ginormous dot-matrix printer that they bought along with the system.

The Commodore A500 was released in 1987 and discontinued 1991. Along with a monitor and printer, it filled a huge study desk that a carpenter had to custom make for my room. It had a processor running at 7.16 MHz 7.09 MHz with a (PAL) Memory 512KB (9.5MB maximum). That was 20 years ago, these days the notebook that I purchased 3 years ago runs on Pentium M at 1600MHz 591MHz with 504 MB of RAM. If you think about it, a complete computer system puchased for over $1000 at the time it only had 512KB in memory...512KB nowadays is just one 3 MP jpeg photograph which 1% of a 512MB micro-SD card that can blow away if you sneezed on it.




I thought about the Commodore because I was reading about Telnet and Unix. Before I got a pentium computer in 1997, my only exposure to computers was at the first lawfirm I worked for in the early 90's. Even then, I only used computers to print labels for books. Later on I learned to use Telnet to chat with my boyfriend who lives in Toronto to this day. Talk about meeting one's destiny online :o) Before I went back to get my undergraduate degree in Buffalo, NY (thus bringing me closer to my guy) I bought my first PC, a Gateway 2000. It was then that I learned how to chat using IRC, mIRC, etc. At Canisius College in the late 90s, our email interface was UNIX. I did not learn to use Outlook until my senior year in 2001, by then I was in my late twenties. Nowadays, we chat via different chat programs out there, Yahoo, AIM, even voice over IP communications like Skype or Vonage, most with video conferencing capabilities.

I guess the whole point of this long and winding reminiscing is the thought of how far technology has brought us. I for one would not resist a technological advancement wherein you can dial in a destination, i.e. teleporting a la Star Trek...well, I guess as long as I get to my destination alright without missing an appendage or half my hair or without messing the make up of my DNA :o)