A Sampling:
- 1876: “This ‘telephone’ has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication.” — William Orton, President of Western Union.1903;
- “The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.” — President of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford’s lawyer, Horace Rackham, not to invest in the Ford Motor Company;
- 1946: “Television won’t be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night.” — Darryl Zanuck, film producer, co-founder of 20th Century Fox;
- 1995: “I predict the Internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse.” — Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, inventor of Ethernet. (BTW, 1995 is when I first got on the Internet IIRC.)
It reminded me of a fellow teacher who bought a computer something like this sometime before 1995.
As you can see it was a 40mhz machine. It would have had a 386 processor, and it would have run DOS as windows was still not a thing. It left my still relatively new 386 25mhz machine in the dust.
Yet when he said, "I will never need another computer," I shook my head with skepticism — metaphorically, of course, for I didn't wish to bring him down from his happy place.
It didn't seem like too many years later that I purchased a Pentium (586) 90mhz computer with much more RAM, disk space, and an internal modem to boot.
I don't even know the speed and capacity of my present computer, but it is much beyond that Pentium 90 of mine and has a powerful graphics card. And it's already getting more obsolete than I would wish.
OK. I looked it up — a 64-bit machine, running at 3.40Ghz with 16GM RAM and who knows the rest, like how big and fast my graphics card might be?
9 comments:
I'm completely in the dark about RAM and ROM and bits, but I love my laptop, even though it's getting old, and I'm totally amazed by my i-phone.
The first tech stuff that came into our house was a Commodore 64 for OlderSon's 13th birthday. WOW that thing was amazing...... at the time.
Oh you guys...I had apples after using whatever wordprocessor was first out there (a hand-me-down from my ex-husband). Now I won't even tell you the old things I have, but there is an external hard drive back-up for my photo files. I also of course have iCloud. It's fun thinking of how do our grandchildren learn more about technology...I'm serious, there are no classes for that, so HOW do the learn it all!
My first computer was a Apple IIc, I got it with every add-on available: RGB monitor, extra floppy disk drive (128K), printer, joystick, and floppy disks....cost of everything in 1984 was around 5 grand. My dissertation took up two boxes of floppy disks.
All I know is my IPad works well!
What a relic!
At the moment I'm preparing posts from a visit to the Science and Technology Museum, and some of that is quite archaic compared to what we see today.
I bought my first home computer in the early 80's. I was astounded that each subsequent purchase, and there were many, was less expensive than the previous.
Yes, they get larger and more powerful while getting cheaper. I'm using an antique.
our first computer was a Kaypro with a floppy disc operating system. 1985 or thereabouts.
LMAO
This is funny. My husband worked for an airline when they began to bring in computers. They thought one computer per 2 people would be fine! Mind you, those were the days of clerks taking phone reservations for bookings, clothespinning the seat to a line, and it circling around to main booking!
We piloted computer-generated report cards, back in the day. It was great.
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