Category: Education

This post follows on from A Lifetime of Technical Evolution: Part 1

In the years that followed the first PC in our workplace, one remembers the introduction of Word Processors, for which the company standardised on Wang products.  In late 1982, after nine years in Melbourne, my job took the family back to Sydney. Soon after, personal computers began appearing in the offices of some ‘pioneers’.  One remembers Apple IIe and Commodore 64 as the favoured tools at the time.

The first computer to appear in our household was the somewhat amazing Apple IIc, in late 1984.

(Photo courtesy of Wikipedia)

This natty ’little’  machine provided hours of educational entertainment for the family. More importantly, the girls learned to type on it. Part of the logic in purchasing this computer was based on the technology teacher at their school. His advice to parents was that “By the time these children reach 6th grade primary, if they can’t touch type, they will be left behind.”

It is worth reflecting on the fact that the Apple IIc was an early indication of the advent of a portable personal computer, precursor to the laptops and netbooks that are now so prevalent. It had 128 KB of built in RAM, 32 KB ROM, a processor which ran at just over 1MHz, and it accepted 5.25 inch floppy disks!

It wasn’t long before the first Windows PC was needed at home, so that there could be compatibility with work done at school or office.  About seven desktops and  three or four laptops later, the home computer on which I am writing as has 6 GB of RAM (6,000,000 KB), 1340 GB of internal memory and processor speed of 3.33 GHz (just 3000 times faster than the Apple 2c) Well, it is nearly 30 years, after all.!

While thinking about the huge increase, that we have experienced in RAM and ROM, it is also amazing to consider storage. I can recall our IT department, with its huge IBM mainframes, jealously guarding against the need for increased storage, because it was so expensive.  Storage seemed to become ‘relatively cheap’ in the 1990s, when the benchmark was $1.00 per megabyte, i.e. we had to pay $250 for the 250 MB we wanted to add to our PC. We can now buy 1 terabyte for less than $100!  (1TB = 1,000,000 MB, so on the old criteria, 1TB would have cost $1million).

It is a sobering thought that the average mobile [smart] phone now has more processing power and storage capacity than the English Electric KDF9 computer at the University of Sydney: the computer we learnt to programme in 1964.

Photo shows an English Electric KDF9 Computer, similar to the one installed at Sydney University in 1964. (Photo courtesy chezfred.org.uk)

Without these incredible developments, we would be much less anxious to take, and store, all our digital photos, let alone a movie or TV series.

Similarly, without the increases in processing power, communications, the internet and our blogging capacity would not have evolved so rapidly.

“The only constant is the increasing rate of change” – Anon

I recently had the opportunity to talk to a group of fifth class boys at my old school. This was to contribute to their project on the history of the school. My visit involved sharing with them what the school was like when I attended, more than 50 years earlier.

They weren’t surprised when I told them there were no computers in our time.

They were a little more surprised to learn that there was not yet television in Australia when I was their age. Black & white TV arrived in time for the Melbourne Olympics in 1956. It eventually made it to our house late 1961.

The boys seemed intrigued that we used to write with stick pens, dipped in ink wells located in each desk. We could progress to a fountain pen when we mastered the nib on a stick pen.

My first encounter with a computer was at Sydney University. The University’s second computer was installed and commissioned during my third year. Like the first, the new computer occupied rather large air-conditioned space in the School of Physics. As third year students, we were able to take a vacation course to learn to write a programme for the new computer.

The first computer to arrive in our work place was an HP9825a ‘Programmable Calculator’.   It had a 32 character scrolling LED dot matrix display, magnetic tape cartridge storage and produced output on paper tape. The read write memory was a princely 22,238 bytes! [Yes, bytes, not megabytes]. While it was purchased for a specific purpose in another department, I identified a use for it in forecasting and learnt to programme and use it (in my own time, of course). This was about 1976.

Photo source http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com

Footnote. This is not intended as an authoritative treatise on the development of computers. Rather it is a journey with an evolving scientist’s contact and experience with computers.