The Internet has been with us for some 20 years now, and I don't recall any technological development that has caught on more quickly or more thoroughly than this one has. Since I am a 1940 model and am getting some age on me now, I have seen quite a few new technologies come into our way of life. When I was very young, radio broadcasting was big, and television had not appeared on the scene. Really nice radios in very attractive and expensive wooden cabinets were available for home use, and many families were well-off enough to afford one of those. Although television was becoming practical for homes around 1947, most of us around Pea Ridge didn't see television sets until 1951 or so. Our family got our first television in 1953, and our first home telephone in 1954. Televisions and dial-up telephones caught on quickly, but I don't recall the advance of TV and phone technology moving as fast as computers and the Internet.
Before the 1990s, there had been a number of electronic networks established, especially in large universities and major industrial companies, over which computer users could communicate. In fact, early computers tended not to be the sort of free-standing personal computers that we began using in the 1970s and 1980s. Computers tended to be large mainframe machines, with room-sized banks of glowing electronic tubes, similar to the tubes that made the early radios and televisions work, only many more in number. Air-conditioned rooms had to be provided to hold down the heat generated by all the vacuum tubes and processors. Connected to the mainframe computer would be numerous workstations, with various means of reading essential information from the computer and various means for entering data to be processed by the computer. Sometimes this meant that a work station had a display screen, similar to today's computer screens, and perhaps a keyboard (adapted from the typewriter), or there might be a card punch and a punch card reader, or even a simple row of lights, some of them lighted and some of them dark. Some early computers, before the invention of disk drives and tape drives, would store their data on punched paper tape. So the early computers were big, and had many winking lights and whirling spools and reels. They were impressive to watch, even though today's cellphones are more powerful and more capable computers than those which filled rooms years ago.
Interestingly, even though today's transistor and microchip-based computers are much smaller, and we no longer see the massive computers of years ago, we seem to be moving back to the situation in which we no longer operate independent personal computers. Rather, we are working over the network, over the Internet. Many of today's users, rather than having their working application programs installed on their personal machines, are working over the Internet, using software based on big server computers located far away, and saving their data files on storage units which may be based half-way around the world. This is a definite reversal of the trend which started in the 1970s, separating personal computers from the big mainframes, and making them basically self-sufficient. Is that good? Or is that bad? I think my answer is, Yes, it is good and it is bad.
After being a Commodore computer user from 1984 to 1990, I began taking on the IBM-compatible computers. My first one was made by American Standard. It was equipped with the old Intel 8088 central processor, an MSDOS 3.3 Operating System, and it had a 20 MB hard drive. I was equipped first class for that time. By 1996, I had an Everex Computer, with an 80 MB hard drive, along with the MSDOS 6.22 Operating System and that new-fangled Windows 3.1. That was powerful enough for handling electronic mail, so I installed a 56.6 Mhz modem to provide for a dial-up Internet connection, and signed up for free email which was being offered as a promotion by our Woodruff County Library where we lived at the time. I would call those the good old days of computer emailing, back when there were no viruses, or malware, or worms, or data-stealers, or data-destroyers, and no identity thieves.
The Internet has brought us hugely useful facilities for communicating, for sharing, for researching, and for entertainment. It has also brought about access to cesspools of corruption, threats of intrusive and destructive programs and scripts, and has required a whole new industry of computer security. The computers today have to be hugely more powerful in order to maintain the same level of performance, while monitoring and guarding against the nefarious and sneaky onslaughts of tricksters who want to mess up your life.
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Editor's note: Jerry Nichols may be contacted by email at [email protected] or by phone at 479-621-1621.
Editorial on 03/30/2016