Computers, laptops, tablets, smartphones

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Where would we be without our electronic gadgets? I have watched this trend take shape from the beginning. My first introduction to computers was back in 1973. I attended a business school and as part of my education I took some computer classes which caused me to see where the future was heading. Of course back then the computer took up a whole room the size of an auditorium and we worked at workstations that were connected to it. Back then we wrote the programs we wanted to run. We had to learn languages like basic, COBOL, and FORTRAN. Some of the students were better at constructing programs than me. One young man wrote a program that told the computer to print out a page of X's and when it was done it was a picture of the Mona Lisa. Even his teacher was impressed. In 1977 I moved to another part of the country that had a very good school and enrolled in it, this time with computer science as my major. This was the year that Tandy released the first personal computer called TRS80 Model 1. I caught the eye of one of my instructors because he said I had a very logical mind and thought almost like a computer so he offered me specialized training. He wanted me to have a computer at home but I told him my credit wasn't good enough to get an account at radio shack so he cosigned so I could buy the computer. I got the TRS80 Model 1 With the expansion interface with the cassette drive and two floppy drives, a rs-232 port which was needed to hook up a modem. It also came with a serial printer. These used paper that had little holes in the side to attach to the carriage that fed it through and each page was attached to the next by a perforated line. I had to write programs for it in basic which was the language it used and the operating system was basically DOS. Although it had a program called windows 3.1 the DOS had to be loaded on each disk you stored anything on or you couldn't read the disk. Oh yeah, the disks were 5.25 inches and really bendable, hence the name floppy disk. I don't think these even had a hard drive because you had to save all your work to floppy disk if you wanted to access it again. Tandy continued to upgrade their computers and I owned several of them but this first computer will always be my first love. Of course I doubt very seriously that I could operate it now. My next actual computer that I owned was an IBM class that was running windows 95. We no longer had to write programs we could buy them and just plug them into the A drive which was a 3.5 inch disk drive. This was much simpler and spoiled a lot of us. This was when everybody's love/hate relationship with computers began. Now we had the internet, dial up of course, and it was slow. Do you remember the crazy sounds it made while connecting? As the internet got better windows had to get better to keep up and computer manufacturers had to advance as well. The first computers were somewhat bulky but the hard drives were small and they had very little memory. That soon changed. Computers got physically smaller but with larger capacity hard drives and much more memory. Now we have tablets and smart phones that are more powerful than that first computer that took up a whole auditorium. You never hear anyone talk about 256k memory any more. It's usually referred to in gigs now. Trust me that is a lot. I have seen commercials where people could access computers in thin air or embedded in their arm. Do you think that is where the future is heading?