As we celebrate our 20th anniversary at Small Dog Electronics, I thought it would be fun to take a trip down memory lane to see where we’ve come from, where we are, and a quick peek into the future of computing.
Humble Beginnings
The first electronic general purpose computer was called ENIAC. (Electronic Numerical Integrator And Computer.) Completed in 1946, the ENIAC contained over 17,000 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 5 million hand soldered joints, weighed 30 tones and took up an entire room! It was originally designed to calculate artillery firing tables and later helped to study the hydrogen bomb.
At the height of operation the ENIAC could perform over 5,000 simple addition or subtraction operations per second. (Compare that to today’s supercomputers which can perform 55 quadrillion calculations per second.) The fastest home computers can perform up to 5 billion calculations per second.
The first Apple home computer was released in 1976. It had a measly 8 KB of memory and no external storage. The Apple II, released in 1977, had the option of connecting an external storage device.
Computers of today come with an internal drive capable of storing 1 terabyte (TB) of data.
Memory
How many of you remember the original Tron?? The main character Flynn encounters an entity known as “Bit”. Bit could only say two things, yes or no, which is the basic unit of information of all computers.
A “bit” can either be 1 or 0 (yes or no). From the bit, we moved to the “byte”, which is 8 bits, and then it got a little crazy. The kilobyte was the next jump in memory. A kilobyte (KB) is 1024 bytes or 8192 bits. (Yes we know “kilo” means 1000, told you it got crazy from here!)
After the kilobyte came the megabyte (MB) which is again 1024 kilobytes or just over 8 million bits. Everyone by now is familiar with the almighty gigabyte (GB) and you guessed it, is 1024 MB or over 8 billion bits.
I’m not going to do the math from here on out, but most computers nowadays come with 1 terabyte (TB) of storage (1024 GBs). The next leap will be the “petabyte” (1024 TBs), and then “exabyte”. One exabyte will be enough storage capacity to store an entire…human…lifetime of memories!
Storage
When personal computers became popular in the 80s some of the first storage devices were on magnetic tape. The old Commodore Vic-20 came with what looked like a cassette player from which you could load programs and games. By the time the Commodore 64 came out we had moved on to “floppy disk drives”. The disk looked like a very thin 45 record encased in a thin square covering. So-called “hard disks” came next. The were a bit more solid than the floppy disks and did not tend to flop around a lot. The “optical” drive came shortly after. Most folks are familiar with these which operate like a CD player with your programs and such stored on what looks a lot like a CD.
We’ve moved on to the Solid State Drive (SSD). Instead of a spinning disk drive the Solid State Drive is a series of chips that can now store your memories. A Solid State Drive is less prone to wear down as there are now no more moving parts.
The Future
Where is this all heading?? As technology grows, changes and improves, so will all of your electronic devices. With the advent of nanotechnology, computers will become smaller and smaller. As we understand more and more about “quantum physics” we will be able to translate that understanding into quantum computers. Remember we spoke about the “bit” being either zero or one?? With a quantum computer that value can be both at the same time!
In 1965 it was proposed that the computing power of chips would double every 18 months to two years. Some say we’ll eventually be able to manipulate atoms to store information. There are others who predict a “technological singularity” in which the artificial intelligence will far surpass the intelligence of human beings as a whole. While many fear the idea of robots like the Cylons or Daleks running around this planet, keep in mind the very first robots will be designed to serve humanity with the idea of not harming anyone built right into their hardware.
Computers will become wearable, implantable and ingestible! They will become so much more a part of our everyday life than even today. They’ll run your house, your car and report to your doctor.
Who knows what the future will bring? Its a little scary but very exciting at the same time. Here at Small Dog we hope to be a loyal companion to you through all of this.
woof, arf, woof!
(The future is so bright, I gotta wear shades.)