[OtinG]

In an astrophotography forum this morning they were talking about the first generation of personal computers that were popular back in the early 1980s. It made me think about my first real computer, the Apple II Plus with a whopping 48 KB of RAM (as in kilobytes, not megabytes, and darn sure not gigabytes), and two add-on external 5.25" floppy drives with 160KB (kilobytes) capacity each. Hard-drives in those days cost more than the computers, were finicky, failed quite often, and only had about 5 to 10 MB. I couldn't afford a HDD. But DOS didn't require a lot to run. And as low spec as my Apple II Plus was by today's standards, it was way more powerful than the computer inside the Apollo spacecraft that flew to the Moon and back. As far as that goes, a 1970s Texas Instruments pocket calculator had more computing power than the computer inside the Apollo spacecraft! And yet I ran the engineering operations of a manufacturing plant with a similar spec computer to the Apple II Plus back in the early 1980s. We've come a long way in computing power since those early days of PCs. But the earliest electronic computers had vacuum tubes rather than transistors and required large buildings to house, so the PCs were quite an accomplishment in the evolution of computers.

Sorry for the off topic jog down memory lane, but sometimes it is good to remember just how good we have it these days as far as technology goes, and it makes the new iPads and Macs look pretty awesome by comparison!