The long Arc of technology...
(The following blog entry was originally posted on Blogger on 01/13/10)
When I entered the professional world in 1987, I had virtually no computer experience. While in college, I had played with the then all-in-one Macintosh 512K that the campus gallery had bought, and had drawn some abstract little nothing of a piece of art using MacDraw or MacPaint or some such program. But I basically had no idea they worked.
And then I was thrilled by printing an image out on a dot matrix printer. That would have been around late 1984/early 1985. The Mac was named the 512K because that was the maximum amount of RAM it would handle. Think about it. 512K. And a 400K hard drive. It had a 3.5" floppy drive, but that's what you ran your programs from. No seriously. Iām not lying.
Then in 1987 I got hired by a then-little-known company called Prodigy, which would become one of the first major consumer-oriented online services companies, I was trained on IBM PCs and really felt immersed in new technology. We were using PC ATs at the time, which were rather large units, probably the width and depth of a microwave, and about 8" in height. On top of the PC sat a 640 x 480 monitor, capable of 16 colors. Next to it sat a Hayes 1200 or 2400 baud modem (I have no idea how slow that is ā I just know it's slow). We used a proprietary graphics program for generating sites and banner ads for advertising clients that used those 16 colors, and if we used any of 3 or 4 patterns, we could create the illusion of up to say 24. I remember the fervor over the news a couple years later than new PCs would ship with CD ROM drives. This would be a game changer for installing a more robust version of the service, and possibly expand the quality of onscreen graphics and product images. By the time Prodigy had a chance to expand the graphics capability of its software and service, the Internet opened up and off-the-shelf tools for creating HTML and GIF or JPG files buried it. (Speaking of Prodigy, its first CEO, Ted Papes, passed away on January 8, 2010).
In the mid-1990s I started a company with a colleague from art school and the first computer we bought was a Macintosh PowerBook 180c. We maxed it out with 14MB of RAM and an 80GB hard drive. A few months later we added a high-end desktop Mac, a PowerMac 8100/80 tower, which had a 80MHz processor, a beefed-up 24-bit color graphics card and 21" CRT color monitor. We used portable SyQuest drives with 44MB and 88MB disks for portable data. If you've never seen a SyQuest drive or disk, it's worth Googling. The were portable yes, but the drive unit weighed a good 8 lbs.
A year or so later, around 1996, I left that company and started to freelance as a graphic designer. The first system I bought myself was a used Mac IICi, but soon after that bought a PowerMac 8500 tower, with a built-in CD-ROM drive, 128MB RAM, another 21" color monitor, 24-bit color graphics card (that I had to install myself), Iomega Zip drive (remember those? 100MB disks, about the size of a 3.5" floppy disk), an Iomega Jaz drive (for larger jobs, 1GB and 2GB disks), a US Robotics 28.8K modem for dial-up Internet connectivity, and an external 2X CD-R drive for burning data to CD. Btw, while I had this system I upgraded the RAM with an additional 64MB, which then cost $369.00. Today, you can buy 8GB of RAM for a MacBook Pro for about $120.00.
Cut to last December, when my company purchased new some Macs - all of which have 3GHz processors, 4GB of RAM standard, 500GB hard drives. The larger iMac has a 1TB hard drive. I can't even do the math of how many times greater in speed that is from the old Mac 512K I used in college in 1985. All I know is that they super fast, and rarely crash. Wow, did I just write that?
It's mind-boggling to witness sea change after sea change with programs like Adobe Creative Suite and so many others that are so feature-rich. And yet the components of a computer continue to accelerate in speed and capacity and become smaller and thinner. Meanwhile, the price of a system remains constant, or in most cases, lower in cost year over year. It's good for businesses, like mine, whose technology start-up costs are far lower than in previous years. And it's something that I never cease to find fascinating. What's next? Looks like the iSlate (or whatever Apple decides to name it) is right around the corner. Get ready for another paradigm shift.