You probably all already know that the PC is celebrating a birthday. I was a sort of late arrival to the PC business; but when I look at what I have now compared to the PC that my employer at Edwards AFB helped me get, its amazing. Consider the differences in a mere 20–some years. My XP desktop has 2g of system memory, a 250g Maxtor SATA drive, a 128mb nvidia card. Whoa!! Others tell me that’s a minimal system. For me, I have two of these Pentium 4 Prescott systems that do wildly different things. One is a capable server thta does VPN, Mail, Usenet, Samba, NFS. All of that for free. What was my Linux desktop now runs XP Professional for a variety of reasons; not associated with personal need or desire. It came down to work requirements and I decided that I had to do what I had to do to get more productivity from daily computing. I just don’t have the time to boot an OS inside an OS. I consider XP to be a tool user’s choice for what I do. Its not perfect but then again no OS really has been (since OS/2 Warp, that is).
Now we have the 25th anniversary of the common PC. Consider the evolution of it; but mostly consider the evolution of business and philosophy around the PC and all that its done for us in business, school, life. I believe that inventions are closely tied together and there are single things that come along that “fork” many paths.
Take this weblog even for example or the so-called blogosphere. Without the PC, how much of this could have been done? I venture to guess close to none. Blogging seems to be the way that news permeates from some corners of our weary world. Weary of violence, fighting, fervor. Why do we need all that? Like someone once said, “can’t we just all get along?”
I doubt it. We need killing fields because we are lowly primates after all. Higher orders of intelligence understand that we are just lowly humans and that we must engage in our battles for oil, land, money. Perhaps the first two shadow the last one. If its not money; its access to the money.
Enough composite realities. You got my promise if the PC can live on for 25 years that this here blog can also.
