We had one of the first Apple computers because my brother worked for Apple. He was 18 and went to a guy’s house a couple of miles away to assemble computers in the basement. It took 1 week to assemble each computer, and at the end of the summer, he purchased one of those computers for $500.

The computer had no hard drive and only 16K RAM, or active memory. To play a game, we would type in programs from a magazine, though some of them were just pictures. When we shut the computer off, the program was went poof so that the next day we had to painstakingly type it all again in order to play.

The best memory was when my brother purchased a floppy disc drive with 32k memory and upgraded the Ram to 64K, so that after typing in the program, we could save it to a disc. The pixels on the screen were 30 x 18 for a total of 540 pixels, roughly half inch squares. Numbers meant everything to us as we could easily understand how big any upgrade was.

My phone now has 256 gig memory and roughly 100,000 pixels. These numbers don’t mean anything to this generation because they are so out of control huge. At any given time there are roughly 20-30 programs running on any home computer, though people often have 6-10 tabs open at once. Who comprehends any of this?

People from my generation have now witnessed a staggering change in the memory. Try these for some calculations. Floppy discs that were used to store any programs were about 1/32 inch thick when squished by the weight of many more on top of them. If we could stack the amount of those floppy discs from our first computer purchase that it takes to equal the storage in my phone today, the stack would be over 2 million inches high. In case you are wondering, the memory of my phone, this pile of floppy discs, would be over 33 miles high. This advancement does not compute, yet it will become greater.

I have a 72 inch TV screen and my baseball team is in the playoffs today. Now that I comprehend. Hope that you have a Happy Friday.

I would love for you to share this post if you enjoyed it or have good thoughts from reading it. Leave a comment to share with me and thank you for your time here.