Advances in PCs

I'm not sure that this is the right blog in which to put this post, but here goes.

I received my iPad three days ago. It is definitely a lot of fun, and the cool factor is incredibly high. The questions are What to do with it? Will it be useful enough to justify the cost? Even the show Wait Wait Don't Tell Me was asking a caller what she could do with it that she couldn't do with her laptop.

Their question isn't really the important one, though, since it is rarely true that there are things that you wouldn't be able to do at all with the old technology. Mostly the advantages make those things easier, faster, more fun, etc.

I was reflecting on this in car yesterday and today. I have had a personal computer of some time for about three decades. I got an Atari 800 in about 1980. In 1984, I got one of the first Macs (within about three months of their introduction). After that, I upgrade the Macs, and my work, wherever it was, started providing me with computers as well, first MS-DOS based and then Windows. I had to get my first laptop (Windows 3) but now the university gives everyone laptops.

So what can we do now that we couldn't do before? Certainly, we have more memory, faster processors, larger hard drives, and better screen resolution, but the biggest change in these three decades has been networking. My first computers were stand-alone. Printers had to be directly connected. We could transfer files with floppy disks (the sneakernet). Most of us did not have email or other online communications.

That started to change with things like networks at work and America Online over the phone lines at home. I first saw the Internet in action in 1979 at Carnegie Mellon, but didn't manage to make much use of it for years (and years) later. The first steps involved modems, starting at 300 bps, which is slower than you can read the text on the screen as it comes through. I remember trying to shop online (for some CDs that I knew existed but couldn't find). I also, in about 1987 proposed a system of online education to The American College, but they rejected the idea.

Other than networking, though, the major advances in computing have been ones of speed, capacity, and so forth, not of kind. The question is whether these kinds of changes add up to something qualitatively new over time.

Let's take some examples. My Atari 800 had some drawing programs, which were a new thing at the time. ou could use a joystick to draw pictures on a TV screen. The biggest limitation was the low resolution, since you could see the box-like pixels that made up the pictures. Other things that I did on that early computer were word processing (my doctoral dissertation), statistics (my dissertation again), games such as docking a supertanker, Asteroids, etc. And let's face it, those are the kinds of things that we still do in many cases, except for the networking part.