Last Saturday I was with Marion at the swimming pool in Haaksbergen. As normally it was very enjoyable.
When we were relaxing in the whirl pool I was listening to a song. I never heard the song before, neither I had an idea who the performing artist was. There was one line that caught my intention… “I have seen a world change”.
I realized that I indeed have seen a world changing over the last 25 year. When I mumbled something about that, Marion asked me what the heck I was talking about.
It must have been around 1982 when I got my first computer, a ZX 81. And now, June 2009, there is so much changed when we talk about computers and anything connected to it.
Many computers passed my hands is those years… Let me see, after the ZX 81 an Texas Instruments TI-99 came along. To be followed by a Comx 35/PC and an MSX home computer.
A XT 8606 with a CGA monitor was my first real PC. Followed up by a real 8Mhz AT with an EGA monitor (with 16 colors!!!). After that things went fast… a 386, a 386sx, a 486sx, a Pentium, a Pentium III… up to the Duo Core desktop and laptop that I have now.
Also I saw all kind of networks… twisted pair peer to peer networks, coax, token ring, cat based networks, fiber. All seen it, worked with all. And of when end of the 80’s the network of network came along: The Internet.
The Internet… a story apart! Who does remember things as SLIP, Gopher and DosLynx? Connecting with a 300bps modem to Amsterdam… my poor phone bill.
And nowadays it hard to imagine a world without the Internet. We use it for everything… to look up information, to book journey, to buy things, for banking… and many, many more things.
Lets have a look at the communication means that I had over the years. It all started with a 1200/75 modem (split baudrate!) for Videotext. This was replaced by a 300bps modem for visiting BBSes and for sending (echo) mail on the Fidonet. But 300bps was not that fast after some time, so a 56K modem was bought. ISDN with 128K channel (if I recall correct).
And the time of the broadwide networks arrived. First a cable connection of 4Mb. Followed by a switch to ASDL 4Mb, which was upgraded 8, 12 and 20mb now. And I am on fore eve of a fiber connection of 40mb up/down.
About the operations systems can the same story be told. Text-based CPM and MS DOS (from version 2.x up to 6.x), the first Windows versions that ran upon DOS, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows Milenium (ugh), Windows XP and Windows Vista.
SCO Unix and all kind of Linux distributions. As we are close to network OS’es, lets not forget my beloved Novell Netware.
That Wordstar was nothing that would stayed might have been clear form the beginning. But how big the surprise was that Word Perfect was wiped out by MS Word?
I could write so many ore things about everything I saw come and go in this weird world called IT.
After some talking about this all with Marion, I pulled her close in the whirl pool and said it again: “I have seen a world change!”. And we both knew that I was right.
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