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Posts tagged ‘computers’

You’ve come a long way baby…

commodore_64_box

One of the editing suites I’ve been working in lately has a great poster on the wall – it’s a photocopy of a flyer for a local computer store sale around 1992 or so. It’s always great to remind yourself how far technology has come in price alone (A handheld Logitec Scan-Man 256 shade greyscale scanner for $500? What a STEAL). It’s the same reason I keep a couple of carefully selected copies from my old subscriptions to Compute! and PC Gaming & CD-ROM Review around (I love that it split into two magazines so as not to taunt those without CD-ROM drives).

Every once in a while though you get a real tangible example of how far computing has come, and how quickly (I had a realization last year that three or four old-ass pentiums I had kept around for various server grunt-work at home could be collectively replaced (and improved substantially) with one $50 five year old used HP desktop off-lease office system… that also used only a fraction of the electricity of it’s predecessors).

This is all just set up to link to this fun piece from Technologizer, where Harry McCracken compares the venerable Commodore 64 with the new iPhone 3GS. Not a lot of deep insight to be gained – but a couple of good “gee-whiz” moments when looking at specs and a nice trip down technology memory lane.

Lots of network neutrality thoughts likely to come up this week with the big CRTC hearings set to begin July 6th.

Welcome TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW (echo)

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

Gizmodo pointed me to this Microsoft video envisioning a possible “state of technology” in 2019. It being Microsoft’s vision, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that 2019 will be full of Microsoft Surface and ePaper.

What did surprise me was a lot of the “yeah, right” comments after the article along this ilk:

…2019 is VERY optimistic. This video looks more like it might be from 2059. -gerrylum

I’m sure it’s just a confluence of re-reading “Microserfs” this week, and realizing how dated a ten year old “advanced technology outlook” it really is, and hearing a group of University Students from my own alma matter talk today, but for whatever reason I’m accutely aware at how fast technology can change in a relatively short period of time.

To try and figure out where we might be ten years from now – it’s helpful to look at where we *were* ten years ago.

Pismo

This was a state-of-the-art Apple PowerBook ten years ago.

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This was a state-of-the-art cell phone ten years ago.

This was what Google looked like ten years ago (even better is what Google looked like eleven years ago.

Ten years ago Sony made waves by introducing an (almost) High Definition camcorder that only cost $82,000!

Ten years ago this was the next generation of video gaming.

Ten years ago this television series was just beginning.

My point being if something like the Microsoft video is the *best* we can do, given another ten years… we’re not trying hard enough.