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I just had a bit of an epiphany
But first, in order to maintain my true inimitable style, a bit of back-story.
I was working with my Palm Pilot (a T|X) yesterday. I was trying to get some novels uploaded as I use my Palm as an entertainment device in case I’m ever stuck somewhere with time on my hands: I’ll always have something to read! I had finished David Weber’s Honor Harrington series and was wanting something new.
Over the course of reading news on the web, I came across an article mentioning or written about Cory Doctrow, the SF writer. He’s sort of a Dystopian near-futurist. He is also unique in that he requires that his books be released online for free when they’re printed through the Creative Commons licensing agreement.
Doctrow has an interesting book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Money has been done away with: you now live off of your reputation. If you become unpopular, you can actually be unable to feed yourself.
So I mosey over to Doctrow’s site (www.craphound.com) and downloaded three books, converted them to an appropriate format, and told my Palm to upload 'em.
No dice.
I get an error message back saying that it can’t upload them because I don’t have a memory card.
The Palm has 128M of ram with over half of it available, but for some reason it wants to load the books into the expansion/memory card ram. So I go to Walmart and buy a Kodak 512M SD card. For $28. I could have bought a smaller one, it didn’t need to be very big, but I couldn’t help myself.
Last night, whilst watching Who Wants To Be A Superhero and some other stuff, I manage to upload the books via infrared from my laptop to my Palm Pilot.
Now here’s the epiphany.
A few minutes ago, I realized that my Palm Pilot has the exact same quantity and memory configuration as my desktop PC at home. My Palm Pilot has 2.5x the memory in the laptop that I’m writing this entry on right now. My desktop PC was a Fry's AMD box with 128meg of ram and Linspire. I added a 512meg memory module and installed Windows on it.
By comparison, the first PC that I bought was a 386SX/16 and I had a whopping 2 meg of memory in it, along with a 20meg hard drive! W00T! (The first computer that I owned was a TRS-80 Model 100 with, IIRC, 24k of memory. I think that was around '83. I still have it. It still works.)
My epiphany came to me as I started thinking about old PCs. I was thinking that the first PCs that I worked on had 640 meg. They didn’t, they had 640 k. Kilobytes. The earlier ones had 256k on the motherboard and you had to plug in an expansion card with 384k to get it up to 640k. Then came back the memories of Extended memory, Expanded memory, High memory, emm386, QEMM, and all of that fun stuff.
So maybe epiphany really isn’t the best of words. It’s still a somewhat startling revelation. At least to me it was, but then, I'm strange.
In the words of Mr. Garcia, What a long, strange trip it’s been.
Upon reflection, I don’t think that computers are substantially different than what I was working with over 20 years ago. Yes, the problems specifically are entirely different because the technology is so radically evolved. But the number of problems I really think is kind of constant. In the last couple of weeks at work we’ve had a massive virus/worm outbreak, a set of UPS batteries that my boss went to replace had bulged and cannot be removed, one part of our email server crashed, a secretary shoved her PC so violently under her desk that it bent the on-board video connector and effectively ruined the motherboard, found many computers running XP Pro with only Service Pack 1 installed, resetting network account logins, creating new accounts for new faculty and staff, power failures causing computer crashes, etc. The main improvement that I can see over 20 years ago, aside from speed and capacity, is that the operating system doesn’t crash nearly as much now as then.
*sigh* I think I have ranted long enough. ;-)
I was working with my Palm Pilot (a T|X) yesterday. I was trying to get some novels uploaded as I use my Palm as an entertainment device in case I’m ever stuck somewhere with time on my hands: I’ll always have something to read! I had finished David Weber’s Honor Harrington series and was wanting something new.
Over the course of reading news on the web, I came across an article mentioning or written about Cory Doctrow, the SF writer. He’s sort of a Dystopian near-futurist. He is also unique in that he requires that his books be released online for free when they’re printed through the Creative Commons licensing agreement.
Doctrow has an interesting book called Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Money has been done away with: you now live off of your reputation. If you become unpopular, you can actually be unable to feed yourself.
So I mosey over to Doctrow’s site (www.craphound.com) and downloaded three books, converted them to an appropriate format, and told my Palm to upload 'em.
No dice.
I get an error message back saying that it can’t upload them because I don’t have a memory card.
The Palm has 128M of ram with over half of it available, but for some reason it wants to load the books into the expansion/memory card ram. So I go to Walmart and buy a Kodak 512M SD card. For $28. I could have bought a smaller one, it didn’t need to be very big, but I couldn’t help myself.
Last night, whilst watching Who Wants To Be A Superhero and some other stuff, I manage to upload the books via infrared from my laptop to my Palm Pilot.
Now here’s the epiphany.
A few minutes ago, I realized that my Palm Pilot has the exact same quantity and memory configuration as my desktop PC at home. My Palm Pilot has 2.5x the memory in the laptop that I’m writing this entry on right now. My desktop PC was a Fry's AMD box with 128meg of ram and Linspire. I added a 512meg memory module and installed Windows on it.
By comparison, the first PC that I bought was a 386SX/16 and I had a whopping 2 meg of memory in it, along with a 20meg hard drive! W00T! (The first computer that I owned was a TRS-80 Model 100 with, IIRC, 24k of memory. I think that was around '83. I still have it. It still works.)
My epiphany came to me as I started thinking about old PCs. I was thinking that the first PCs that I worked on had 640 meg. They didn’t, they had 640 k. Kilobytes. The earlier ones had 256k on the motherboard and you had to plug in an expansion card with 384k to get it up to 640k. Then came back the memories of Extended memory, Expanded memory, High memory, emm386, QEMM, and all of that fun stuff.
So maybe epiphany really isn’t the best of words. It’s still a somewhat startling revelation. At least to me it was, but then, I'm strange.
In the words of Mr. Garcia, What a long, strange trip it’s been.
Upon reflection, I don’t think that computers are substantially different than what I was working with over 20 years ago. Yes, the problems specifically are entirely different because the technology is so radically evolved. But the number of problems I really think is kind of constant. In the last couple of weeks at work we’ve had a massive virus/worm outbreak, a set of UPS batteries that my boss went to replace had bulged and cannot be removed, one part of our email server crashed, a secretary shoved her PC so violently under her desk that it bent the on-board video connector and effectively ruined the motherboard, found many computers running XP Pro with only Service Pack 1 installed, resetting network account logins, creating new accounts for new faculty and staff, power failures causing computer crashes, etc. The main improvement that I can see over 20 years ago, aside from speed and capacity, is that the operating system doesn’t crash nearly as much now as then.
*sigh* I think I have ranted long enough. ;-)
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Oh, and I think Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is really excellent, as is another of his I downloaded (but don't recall the name), about a guy who has a mountain for a father and a washing machine for a mother. Really.
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That story I'm guessing was a short in A Place So Foreign. http://craphound.com/place/
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I don't have a dvd drive on my computer - it's a 733 with 512 ram (ram upgraded this summer) We have a 1 Mhz chip ready to go for my 'puter, but we haven't installed it yet. Once that's in, and the wonky ram is replaced (something is bad - it hiccups and gives memory error on bootup, but it's occasional) we'll put in the dvd burner and PS Elements we have waiting...