Steve Skojec

(Warning: Extreme Nerdiness Ahead)

According to Wikipedia, “Moore’s Law describes an important trend in the history of computer hardware: that the number of transistors that can be inexpensively placed on an integrated circuit is increasing exponentially, doubling approximately every two years…Almost every measure of the capabilities of digital electronic devices is linked to Moore’s Law: processing speed, memory capacity, even the resolution of digital cameras. All of these are improving at (roughly) exponential rates as well. This has dramatically increased the usefulness of digital electronics in nearly every segment of the world economy.”

This morning, my work laptop bluescreened itself into oblivion. With an error along the lines of “unmountable boot drive”, I’m not expecting good things. Our IT guy said, “It’ll be two days. It takes one day just to decrypt it so I can start working on it.”

Thank heavens for high-end security.

I wandered into a back office here that’s used by consultants. The computer that’s sitting there, unused, is a tiny little Compaq powered by a Pentium III. The technology is nearly a decade old. I pushed the power stud and kicked back, looking out over the streets of Arlington while it sputtered and clattered to life, and waited. And waited some more. And….more.

I wasted twenty minutes trying to get the thing up to basic functionality, before giving up.  I found a different computer that was slightly less archaic.

It got me thinking though, just how far computers have come in my lifetime. I’m only thirty, which means I still consider myself young. In a digital age, however, that’s an eternity.

When I was ten, my family bought our first computer. It was an IBM PC clone, an XT, running an 8086 chip. It had 640K of RAM, no hard drive, CGA (four color) graphics, and two 5.25″ floppy drives.

I thought it was pretty sweet.

In sixth grade, I had a “friend” from school (I used him for his technology; he was obnoxious) who had a sweet system with VGA graphics. Capable of 640×480 resolution and 256 colors, it was a quantum leap ahead of my old clunker, and one look at the graphics of King’s Quest V told me I had to have one. But I would have to wait a few more years.

When I was about 16, and had finally gotten myself a job in a hardware store, I began saving up. My parents gave me a loan for $1600 and I finally bought my stallion: a Packard Bell 486 SX pumping out 33MHz, ripping open the software bottleneck with 4MB of RAM, displaying MILLIONS of colors on the Super-VGA display adapter, and holding plenty of files in that huge 128MB hard drive it had. I was a proud owner of Windows 3.1 for the first time, and it was like heaven after years spent fiddling around in DOS and using boot disks. I already had my hands on a 2400bps modem, and I soon coughed up the cash for a smokin 14.4K. I was cruisin’ the BBSes in style, logging into CompuServe and AOL, and finally jumping online for the first time in 1993, when the Internet was still more or less plain text. (I actually had a certificate - I was one of the first 200 Internet users in my county.)

I held onto that computer through the end of High School in 1996. In 1997, during the Spring leading up to my first Fall semester at Franciscan, I got a job as a PC tech at a local computer place. There, I learned the ins and outs of troubleshooting, building, and maintaining PCs. One of the benefits of my job was the ability to buy components for just over cost, so I built myself a sweet upgrade, taking a chance with Intel’s upstart rival, AMD, and one of their latest 686 processors. I doubled my RAM to 256MB, got a massive 2.5 GB hard drive (that set me back about $260, BTW) and rounded out the system with a decent sound and video card, as well as a CD-ROM.

From that point on, it was like a continuing process of refining Frankenstein’s monster. Upgrading parts as needed, the system crept forward to keep up with the times: faster CPU, more RAM, better modem, more video horsepower, etc.

This past Christmas, I finally did a full system upgrade again, because Frankenstein was coming apart at the seams. I now have a 2.3GHz Intel Pentium Dual-Core 64-bit CPU, 2MB of Cache, 2GB of RAM, 650 GB of Hard Drive space, a 512MB GeForce 8800GT Video Card, Wi-Fi adapter hooked to 16MB/second high-speed cable Internet, an optical all-purpose CD/DVD burner with Lightscribe (that can write a label directly on the surface of the disc), surround sound, a Firewire interface between my camcorder and my PC, an iPod touch to take my MP3s with me, and an array of jump drives that allow me to bring my files back and forth to work.

To put things in perspective:

• Just one jump drive holds 2 gigabytes - nearly the same amount of data my $260 Hard Drive in 1997 could hold. It’s smaller than my thumb.
• My PDA phone - a Treo 650 - is exponentially more powerful than that first computer I got when I was ten.
• My current PC could emulate the entire operating ability of my first PC in a window without even impacting my ability to surf the net, listen to music, encode video or play games.
• Windows is still as simultaneously useful and aggravating as it was in version 3.1

I am only looking back about twenty years - there are readers here who can no doubt tell punch card and vaccuum tube computer stories that I would be in awe of. Those same people also remember what it was like before computers were around at all. I’m probably of the first generation who had a computer in their classrom beginning in the first grade, and for whom the presence of computers was ubiquitous thereafter.

I can’t help but wonder, stopping to recognize the power that digital technology has put at our fingertips and how quickly it has advanced, what phenomenal advances in other areas of tech we will witness in our lifetimes. My personal belief is that the next wave of profound innovation will be in materials - particularly through nanotech - which will spur new developments in computing, robotics, batteries, medicine, travel, building, replication, etc. We will also see fascinating developments in physics, at which I can only guess, and things like nuclear fusion could be closer at hand than we think.  Genetic manipulation will also be a strong (and potentially horrifying) area of advancement.

Of course, the only true progress is that which is rooted in the desire for spiritual perfection. Without being moored to something transcendent, we are likely to do as many horrible things as good ones with the knowledge we have amassed.

It will be a fascinating - and perhaps terrifying - time in which to live.