My history with computers 190430

      As I remember, when I first started working at Burroughs corporation in 1977 there was a computer data center that took up more than 12,500 square feet housing I think 3 or 4 mainframe computers. They were behemoths in size. For the most part, they only had access for programmers, payroll and design engineers in most cases and with all that power they were still pretty slow. The peripheral devices like disk drives were near the size of 2 refrigerators stuck together and they held so little data that people in the data center had to manually remove disks and replace them for others to support those using the mainframes. There was also a test floor nearly as big with its own computers. I remember working on the test floor and writing down results with a pen on paper.

      I went to work at Litton in 1987 and at that time (as far as I remember) only engineers, circuit designers and accounting had access to an old Sperry Rand mainframe. Later they bought many of the first IBM desktop computers for areas throughout the plant. Prior to that I had to go to electrical test to get plastic overlays to trace circuits so I could find failures on circuit boards. When we got desktop computers and I could access all of those overlays for troubleshooting circuit boards. That made my life far easier. Along with the desktops came a lot of report writing and record keeping tasks.
      I could see that learning more about Microsoft computers and their various programs was a necessary thing to survive in the modern world of work. I took classes at night to get my start and bought my own computer. From that point on the learning has never stopped because sometimes computers keep updating and changing ways to do the same tasks.
      Now there is more computing power in a cell phone than there ever was in mainframe computers of years ago. There is more power in a cell phone than the astronauts had when they went to the moon.
      The internet for computers started with dial-up access that was slow, slow, slow. Then came miracles in speed to where we are now over 30 years later and we are on the cusp of fifth generation speeds that supposedly will be super fast. That speed comes with big changes. Fourth generation is plenty fast enough for me. While computers have dropped in price the internet costs have risen in price for service so I suppose that is a wash. Now I can pay bills, access data and do most anything with a computer and I like it.
      Now I find myself on a computer several hours a day, either writing or reading other people's posts. I use my computer to watch UTUBE videos on every subject I can imagine.
      
Copyright Bill Weber 2006-2019 and beyond.