An overdose of power, computing power that is.

By: Hazidi Abdul Hamid

The university announced a financial assistance for the management and academic staff to buy tablet computers yesterday. I, of course, am sure my colleagues are happy about this, as am I but then I thought it may not apply to me because I already have one.  I, however, think that tablet technology had a bit more to go before it can become a really viable tool for me because as it is, it still cannot hold a candle to my laptop.  The announcement however made me reminisce on my experience with computers and made me realise how much things have changed.

I suppose I came into contact with computers rather late. My fingers first found a computer when I was in matriculation.  There was a programming class that taught us how to use the BBC Micro machines and the language we used was BASIC.  It was fun but at the time it did not seem too useful for our immediate purposes.  I later learnt of a game called Moria which we played on what would best be called the rudimentary beginnings of the internet.  Around that time , there were other computers vying for our attention.

A friend of mine bought a Japanese machine that had its memory stored on cassettes.  You started the machine and loaded the operating system by putting a cassette into the player.  You then go to make yourself something to eat while it loaded.  That done, you need to load the program that you wanted to use and so on. It took quite a while for the machine to load: long enough for me to take a walk to the fish and chip shop, queue up, put my order in, waited for it to be prepared, walk back, stop to buy a newspaper and make it back just in time to see it ready to go. 

Another friend bought himself a Sinclair ZX Spectrum and what a machine it was... at the time.  The nifty thing about it was that you loaded it using cassettes too but tiny ones.  Better still, you could link a few of these cassette players so that you could load several cassettes at once.  The sound that the cassette players made was very distinctive. 

Then came the floppy disks.  I missed the 8 inch ones but when the 5 ¼ inch ones was a real hit. Everybody began carrying disk boxes around.  The computers in the lab had either one drive slot or two.  You began by inserting the operating system disk and loading it.  Then you took it out and loaded the program via another disk. When that it done, you could either leave the disk in the drive and load your data disk into the other drive or, if you have only one drive, you inserted your data into the other drive.  Our computing world began to take off but it was still a hassle because you needed to remember all sorts of commands, or else you were at the mercy of those who knew them.

Then computer interconnectivity became popular. After lectures, I could walk into the computer lad which could put the books I needed on hold for me. It saved me running to the library to get them.  It worked fine until the library people realised that there was a backdoor into their system and closed it.

When I came home and started to work, I bought myself a computer of my own.  It was huge thing but it had a hard disk.  The thing worked at 12 Megahertz when you pressed a button labelled ‘turbo’. If you did not press the button, the speed went down to 10 mega hertz.  Today, even my handphone is operating at more than 500 megahertz and it is an outdated model.  

Then came the laptops and what a relief it was.  Well, a relief in as for as you could carry it from place to place with relative ease.  Mine was a black and white model but I forgot the make.  Around that time, a friend introduced me to Power Macs what could run both windows and Mac OS.  What wonderful machines they were but I stuck to my windows laptop.  The years went by and the machines grew faster and easier to use, to most people.

I sat back and looked at the machines before me and wondered if we actually have too many machines that do the same things now.  My Nokia E72 can run “work” programs, including a complete office suite, it even surfs the internet easily.  The Android tablet does the same thing, except it has Angry Bird, that damnable addictive bird tossing game.  Of course, there is the laptop which is not my main machine for both work and play.  This machine runs on windows and paid software but today, you can run your machines on completely free software which you can download from the internet; from the Operating System to the antivirus to the office suite and more.  I cannot help but wonder where all this will lead us.  At least now we can see where the anxiety reflected in the Terminator movies came from. 

And so I reach back across time and space to drag a quote that seems most pertinent now, “Quo Vadis?”