Uncle (brother) Don and Aunte Mandy had their baby!
June 25th, 2005
On June 23rd,2005 at around 4:30 AM in the morning my brother Don and his wife Mandy had their first child.
Archive for June, 2005
How far computers really have come over the last 20 years
June 18th, 2005
When you sit back and look back at how things have changed with computers in the last 20 years, you truly have to be amazed!
Today I was looking at a blog at engadget.com and they were featuring the Commodore 64 computer. They had a picture of one of the first computers that I had owned as a kid.
My 6 year old son Mark was looking at it too and I was telling him that was my first computer.
He asked me if it could play Internet games. I had to explain the computer was not connected to the internet but we did have a 300 baud modem that I could dial into another persons computer and read text faster than it could be sent to the computer.
He then asked if I played music and I said only songs that were created with a MIDI device (which was cool then) but there was no one singing in the music.
Mark then gave me a look like “what can you do?” and then asked if I could put pictures on it. I said nope, but I could draw my own pictures. He looked really puzzled now! “Dad? How can you draw without a Mouse?” Man! Those were the days when we used a computer without a GUI and a mouse!!
He finally said, “Man that must have been boring!!” Far from it Mark, far from it. It was fun to learn how to make it do what it could do. I learned to program because I really wanted to see what I could do. For some reason I was just hooked to the idea of making it do what I wanted it to do, or at least trying to make it do what I wanted it to do!
Plus I told him we had no idea back then on what the computer would be capable of doing. Back then I never thought about putting music or pictures on my computer and I the whole idea of the internet……well that must be some huge BBS!
I told him to think what we maybe able to do in another 20 years! The light bulb went on. Who knows maybe in 6 years from now he will create the next killer app!! However I think Madeline will beat him to it. She is already reading my HTML books and figuring out how to do web pages!