230608 Computers

This post came to me this morning and I wrote it from memory. My memories from decades ago may not be exactly correct, but I believe it is reasonably accurate.

Computers have come a long way during my lifetime.

I have never liked computers. All I ever wanted to do was work repairing radios. I was born too late to do that for a living. I enlisted in the navy to learn electronics so I could fix radios. I got to do that on navy aircraft carriers and loved it! By the time I got out of the navy, the thing to do was work on TV sets, so I adapted. Radios had become solid state and they seemed to never break. I have an old Radio Shack radio I bought close to 30 years ago and it still works. Tv sets were already becoming more reliable by the time I started working on them. Now even if I figure out what is failing on a TV, there is no way to get parts to repair them unless I go to the company that built them and by that time people just go out and buy a new set.

These days as soon as you buy a home computer, it’s nearly obsolete because technology continues to advance. The manufacturers only update the software for a limited time, currently about 5 years. The computer will still work, but you are vulnerable to internet hackers without the latest updates.

I began with computers at Burroughs corp in 1978 and worked in product engineering for 6 years. We developed new chips for computers. Once the chip was designed, we had to test it. At first there were problems and we had to find them and repair those faults using microscopes and what were called micro manipulators. I could set down a one micron pin and check if a copper trace was getting a proper signal. One micron is .00003937 inches wide. The design crew got better and soon there were no faults to find. I became tired of working in product engineering. It was no longer interesting. My good friend Kevin had left product engineering to work in the data center on mainframe computers and he encouraged me to follow. I did and worked another 4 years there.

The mainframe computers back then weighed hundreds of pounds and were interconnected to servers through lengthy cables as thick as a large snake and they stretched some times 20-30 feet long. The storage disk drives were separate items. The older drives were in cabinets that were about 5 feet high, 8 feet wide and 2.5 feet thick. They didn’t hold a lot of data. Things were a magnitude better when newer drives came out and were the size of a washing machine. The mainframe computers became better, taking up a much smaller footprint. The last mainframe I saw there was down to slightly bigger than a washing machine and ran circles around the larger mainframes. I think I was only at Burroughs another year, but in that year I don’t remember having to work on that machine.

Fastforward, now we have much of that power in our cell phones. People use their phones for everything they need computer wise. That’s modern technology. I only use my cell phone to talk, but then I’m old school. The world passed me by and I waved at it as it left me standing on the corner.