I recently talked to my "computer consultant" in Minneapolis. She convinced me that my existing five-year old home computer is lacking the capacity to handle all the current software applications in my world. She called our current computer set-up ancient. Well "byte-me".
The company I joined in Sheboygan in 1967 was "leading edge" with business computers. The objective was always to provide employees with important information on a timely basis so they could make necessary decisions to keep us viable in the marketplace. In the 1960's and the 1970's, computer hardware controlled the business world. Computers were very limited in size and each company wrote most of it's own software. The dream was to reach the point where computer capacity wasn't the limiting factor and the creative abilities of employees could be unleashed to give even more competitive advantage.
Fast forward to 2009. Computer capacity has exploded. Software is in abundance. We are prepared to solve all the world problems, We can navigate rocket ships to the moon and beyond. We've arrived baby. So what do we do? We piddle away time on twitter, facebook and e-mail. We download home pictures to handheld palm devices so the world can see our pictues. We play mindless internet "war games".
It took awhile for me to realize the magnitude of computer capacity that is being used storing pictures. Pictures! They are stored on the internet for immediate download. They are attached to e-mails and they are stored in computer files until you can't even find them any more. You know! "Aw, she's so cute". "Oh, is that pretty". "That is so precious". We've lived for 5,000-6,000 years without pictures and now we can't get enough of them Go figure.
In the 1970's, home computers were measured in bytes (a string of 8 binary units) and kilobytes (1000 bytes). A megabyte (1 million bytes) was a huge number. Now one picture can suck up a megabite. But with thousands of pictures, megabyte has been replaced with gigabytes (1 billion bytes). Hard disk storage of 640 gigabytes in not uncommon. We are moving toward terabytes (1 trillion bytes) of storage.
My Minneapolis consultant pacifies me with a minimal amount of information knowing that I am a hopeless cause. But she really doesn't understand the amount of historical perspective I have on computers. I know I don't understand the applications like she does but maybe together we can build a new computer system that lets us launch our own rocketship.
So anyone who wants to loan me enough money to buy a "state of the art" computer system, let me know.
The lesson Grasshopper is technology is contantly evolving. It is almost impossible to anticipate the amount of technology that will be needed 5 years into the future. Alas, between myself and Minneapolis, we are going try.
Love,
Dad
Can we discuss interest with that loan?