 In 1975, I met my first computer. Well, it wasn’t exactly a computer: it was
a dumb terminal connected to a computer at the local college. I was one of
about a half dozen students at my high school introduced to this desk-sized
apparatus in the school basement. Little did I know I was looking at a piece of
world-changing technology. At the time, the contraption seemed like one of
those interesting but not terribly useful gizmos high school science teachers
were fond of getting us to try and learn. You couldn’t do much with it, just plug
in some simple code to do basic mathematical operations. Since I could already
multiply 10 by 100 in my head, I wasn’t really sure what the fuss was all about. In
the two-and-a-half decades since, I’ve watched an almost magical
transformation. Computers have gone from room-filling multimillion-dollar
leviathans to tiny chips that can fit on your fingertip. |
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