The Rise of the Computer as a Household Object




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Image result for old INDUSTRIAL computer For class this past week, we were divided up into groups and each presented on a form of technology that has changed or helped progress communication.  I chose the Personal Computer.  As I researched all the history of the personal computer, I was reminded how far we've come in the advancement of technology over the past half a century.  People from my generation, myself included, take the fact that we have access to computers and the internet whenever we want it for granted, and doing this research presentation really reminded me of that.  Without going into a full history of the PC, it started out as a glorified calculator.  The idea of a machine  that could send messages, play games, or even just have a color screen was foreign to early PC developers.  It came in pieces that you had to assemble yourself, and when it was complete, it looked like a pile of thrown together parts when compared to todays computers.  But, in a day and age when computers normally took up anywhere from a whole room, to a whole floor of a building, it was a good start.  The PC progressed, and with visionaries like Jobs and Woz leading the way, it gained traction until it broke in to the mainstream.  Once people began to see the benefits of having a personal computer, they started spending money on them; and once they started spending money on them, the developers of these PC's got the funds to push forward with their dreams.  Then, just as PCs became a widely common tool for people to have or own, the internet was born. Both of these inventions are astounding on their own, but I believe that putting them together is what propelled them both to where they are today.  The PC would not be where it is today without the internet, nor the internet without the PC, and we are all benefitted by it.  To think of what we sent Apollo 11 to the moon with, a "hi tech" computer that had a whopping 4 KB of memory, and to compare it to  the iPhone in my pocket with 64,000,000 KB of memory, seems ridiculous when you say it out loud.  But, that's where we are, and I am excited to see where the next 50 years takes us.  When you look around today and see how close we are to things like automated cars, sustainable energy, and rapidly increasing quality of medicine, it is only a matter of time until we compare what we have now, to what we have in the future, and think "how did we get by with so little?"

 Links to related articles:
https://computer.howstuffworks.com/pc.htm
https://www.metroweekly.com/2014/07/to-the-moon-and-back-on-4kb-of-memory/

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