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| The last non-Internet Gemeration by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 05/02/2016, 6:09pm PDT | ||||
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| This year effectively ends the last non-Internet generation. Every person born since 1995 has lived in a world where the Internet has always been generally available to almost everyone in the first world, and over about the last ten years, it's been fairly fast broadband.
Think about this. Anyone born prior to 1995 has memories of a time when Internet access was not ubiquitous, was often unavailable in some areas or was very expensive, and in most cases was slow, and when I say slow, in 1988 the most common modem speed was still 2400 baud. That's 240 characters per second. When I first got into computers back in 1978, you had mainframes, which served lots of users but was expensive. Our computer at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa, CA, served about 100 terminals on two campuses from three computers, and, as one of our professors told us, cost "a megabuck," that is, over a million 1978 dollars. And they weren't even all IBM, one was from Magnuson, the other from Amdahl but all ran IBM's OS/VS1 operating system and later VM hypervisor. The open source emulator Hercules can run that operating system in simulation on a PC probably faster than it ran on the original big iron. You also had minicomputers, Long Beach City College, Long Beach, CA had in its Math department a PDP-11/03 that had 56K of memory - and that is not a mistype, it had 56K, not 56 meg - had three CRT and one typewriter-style terminal, used two 256K 8" floppy disks, and cost $20,000. You probably have more capability now, in your hand, if you own an Android tablet or phone that costs about $50. So people born before about 1980 can remember when we didn't have quite powerful computers in our homes. And those who were at least teenagers in 1995 can remember when we didn't have Internet even if we did have a computer. But the kids that are just turning adults this year have no memory of a world without cell phones, computers and the Internet. The proliferation of apps for handheld computers, I think, has barely scratched the surface, and as near-universal wi-fi and connectivity become more common, I suspect we will see new developments that will change the world again. The availability of the PC starting in the early 1980s and the even less expensive availability in the late 1990s as well as what they became capable of doing for us, or allowing us to do with them, changed so many things in so many ways it's hard to believe how different this world is from say, 1987. Compare 1964 ro 1984 and the differences are not that significant. Color TV was crisper, microwave ovens and VCRs were around, but the way we interacted with people was similar to that of perhaps 10 years earlier (except phones were more common). Now look back on 1996 and now, cell phones are everywhere and cheap, most cell phones are actually computers, all have either local or carrier-provided internet, and what we can do with systems rivals what required supercomputers twenty years ago, or might not even have been possible - like 3D printing of objects - and yet, again, we are just now entering a world where every child has lived in a country that has always had Internet connectivity. Now the only question is, will we have the ingenuity to use the power we have to do great accomplishments, or will we suffer from a lack of vision and foresight to think about new things and improvements? As the group Asia put it, "Only Time Will Tell." |
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The last non-Internet Gemeration by 05/02/2016, 6:09pm PDT  Re: The last non-Internet Gemeration by 05/02/2016, 6:56pm PDT One day we may have the power to change the by 05/03/2016, 8:03am PDT Re: One day we may have the power to change the by 05/03/2016, 10:00am PDT Still got it by 05/03/2016, 1:36pm PDT |
