HOME
TOPICS
ABOUT ME
MAIL

 
The only hard drives were trips to the mountains with the kids in the back seat.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

T e c h n o f i l e
How did we cope without the Internet? A look back after 20 years of 'Technofile'


Nov. 30, 2003


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2003, The Post-Standard

   When I started writing my weekly Technofile articles 20 years ago, mail was something that arrived in a big metal box and a mouse was a creature you never wanted to see in your kitchen.
   A web was something spiders made. The word "instant" never appeared in front of the word "messaging" and, for most consumers, the only hard drives were trips to the mountains with the kids in the back seat.
   Our lives have changed so much in the past 20 years that a quick comparison seems impossible. But let's look at just a few of the changes.
   In 1983, the World Wide Web was eight years away. How, then, did kids do their homework? How did grownups find maps to new vacation destinations? What did we all do without Google?
   Students of 20 years ago looked up their assignments in books, of course. Adults bought maps at gas stations. Rectangular objects called "dictionaries" and "encyclopedias" offered many of the functions that Google serves today.
   We didn't miss the Web 20 years ago because we had never known it. It took the invention of the personal computer -- the original small Apple II computers in the late 1970s, the more powerful IBM PC in 1981 and the mouse-equipped Apple Macintosh in 1984 -- to haul us into the modern era.
   The Internet and the World Wide Web were products of a revolution that had just gotten started in the early '80s. E-mail is much older than the Web -- it goes back to 1971 -- and even spam, the junk mail that devils us every day, is older than we think. The first spam letter was sent in 1978.
   It's tempting to think of the Internet as a kind of super-invention, something that rips history apart into "pre" and "post" eras. Life changed relatively quickly after the Internet became a public network in the 1990s, and many of us probably can't imagine what life would be like today without e-mail, Web sites, instant messages and downloadable files.
   But the real hero of the Internet age is the personal computer. If we accept the old-fashioned view of the Internet as the "information superhighway," we can view the personal computer as the vehicle that takes us from one location to another.
   The first personal computers arrived in American homes missing practically everything we expect a computer to have today. In the earliest models, even the keyboards seem brain-dead by today's standards: They could only type capital letters. And those early computers had almost no memory. Some models had 16 kilobytes of memory; others had 64 kilobytes.
   That's not a misprint. We're used to megabytes today -- millions of computer storage units, called bytes. One of my computers has 1.6 billion bytes of memory. But 20 years ago, a typical personal computer came with only 64 thousand bytes of random access memory, or RAM. (Because of the way computers count, the total isn't an even number, but we'll save that discussion for another time.)
   Memory chips were unbelievably expensive, too. In the mid-1980s I paid nearly $300 for a 128-kilobyte memory upgrade on one of my computers. Although memory got cheaper a decade later, it was still incredibly costly. In 1994 I paid $998 for a 16-megabyte memory upgrade for another computer. Today, 16-kilobyte memory chips are given away (if you can even find them) and 16 megabytes of RAM costs less than $10.
   Disk storage tells the same kind of story. The first PC hard drives came out in 1980. They held 5 megabytes and cost thousands of dollars. Most computers came with floppy disk drives, but many of the early models actually used cassette tapes to store files. Even the first IBM PC, the first no-nonsense home computer, had a cassette-recorder connection port.
   In 1986, when I shopped for my first hard drive, I was elated to find a bargain -- a new drive in an external case selling for only $998. If that sounds like a lot to pay for a hard drive (after all, you can get one for $60 today), wait until I tell you what size that drive was.
   It held an astonishing 16 megabytes.
   (Yes, it was astonishing at the time. Remember: The main storage method in those days was a floppy disk. The highest-capacity floppy at that time held 1.4 megabytes, but most held half that much.)
   We were the ones who hungered for more memory and more drive space. We fueled the revolution. We weren't satisfied with what we had. We're still not satisfied.
   The question I can't answer is whether today, 20 years later, we're dissatisfied because computers need more memory and more power or because something went wrong. Smut merchants, scam artists and spammers seem to have taken over a significant part of the Internet, and I'm worried that everything will get worse before it gets better.
   But maybe I'm too pessimistic. Twenty years from now, when I look back at a new lifespan, I hope we will all be pleasantly surprised.