Computing through the ages

This is a fictional non-fiction piece written in 2014

Where have we come from and where is it all going?

I sit with Martin Doubtless of Norwich I.T. as we discuss computing and his business. This is a private flat off Prince of Wales Road in Norwich and not a swanky office near City Hall; typical of the modern one man band sole trader. He has turned one bedroom over to his I.T. endeavours where we sit on two leather computer chairs. In one corner a tall tower computer with a huge black monitor noisily burns fossil fuel and flashes green lights to update on its current happy status. The rest of the room is littered with computing paraphernalia: boxes, monitors, cables (oh so many cables!) and pizza cartons.

We sip our cappuccino coffees, made with the capsule fed coffee machine in the corner, and munch on custard creams as I ask him about the his early experiences of computing. “When I was a kid I used to go to my mum’s work a lot. They got a computer in 1977 called an Apple. This was before the Apple Mac.” He points at an archaic looking computer. “When her company upgraded I got an old one given to me. Well, two, I blew one of them up,” he add sheepishly, “Worth a fortune now.”

The Apple sits there with its large typewriter style box, 5 inch floppy drive boxes above and an archaic looking green screen monitor on top. Who would have thought this first home computer with no more than 64KB memory and no small caps would be adopted so readily by business? Designed initially by Steve Wozniak to a very tight budget to keep costs down, it was in the day still not cheap. Some would say Apple have always remained in that higher realm even now when they are bigger than ever.

Martin points at the monstrous tower in the corner. “Recently I got a really powerful rig for £100 from some bloke. Overkill really and the thing makes my electricity bill much higher. I could do it all on a MacBook. A long way from the Apple.”

There is no doubt, as he says, that the big number cruncher in the corner is a million miles away from the humble Apple. The tower contains four terabytes of storage, compare that to the humble Apple floppy disk of 140KB – 4 terabytes = 4000000000KB! That is a LOT of floppy disks.

I ask him where he thinks it is all heading, but he shrugs: “Oh, who can tell, I think that macro technology may be a big thing. Everything is getting a lot smaller.”

In other words, in the future our computers are going to become almost organic little robots with minute moving parts, close to becoming a new life form. Let’s just hope they don’t learn to breed!