How far we've come

Ordering the new computer yesterday got me to thinking how far computers have come since my first exposure to them in the 70's.  The first computer I ever had my hands on was a Commodore VIC-20 that my brother-in-law got for Christmas one year. There were no programs available, just sheets of programing instructions. We spent 4 or five hours typing in lines of code with peeks and pokes and colons and semi-colons and then another two hours or so of debugging places where we had typed a colon instead of a semi-colon. Once this procedure was complete the entire program was backed up to a cassette recorder and we were able to play Pong. The first computer I owned had no hard drive, just a single floppy drive. This required inserting the DOS disk to start the computer then removing it and inserting a program disk to run whatever program you were using. All this was operated from the C prompt because Windows had not arrived yet. I gradually evolved to two floppy disks eliminating the need to to swap disks in and out of the drive and then the greatest of miracles I got my first hard drive. It had the whopping capacity of 20K and cost over $500.00 but with all that storage I'd never need anything else. The next upgrade was RAM, at that time RAM was going for about $1,000.00 a meg. So I could only afford to upgrade from 1 meg to 2, but boy did it make a difference. Contrast that with the computer I ordered yesterday. It has a quad processor, 8 megs of RAM and a 1 terabyte hard drive, not to mention all the bells and whistles that weren't even though of when I bought my first computer, like a CD burner and card reader. What an amazing progression and all for about the same cost as my first hard drive.

Today will be spent getting ready to transfer files to the new computer and plotting my plan of attack to get Mr. Acer up and running as quickly as possible so I can continue to enjoy the good life.