Technology...

I usually use my trusty old Surface Pro 3 for my writing, but last night, it decided to get stuck in a boot loop that wouldn't complete. Now I'm facing a complete reformat on the thing and doing a fresh reinstall of the operating system.

For now, I'm using the relatively ancient Dell laptop I refer to "As The Slowest Laptop In The Multiverse" to get anything done, and believe me when I tell you that it's a royal pain in the ass to use. It's so old that there are keys that just plain don't work anymore, and even though I have it stripped down to barely nothing to use RAM, it still plods along like a kiddies' pony-ride pony at the Fair.

I've decided that the next time I have an unexpected financial windfall, I'm going to get a new Surface Pro, whatever that model ends up being. My current one is a few years old, and I know the newer ones are better. It's just making sure I have the money to get the model I want, and not settling for something less. That means it's got to have the i7 processor, at the very least.

As I sit here, I realize that my cell phone (an iPhone 7) is leaps and bounds faster than my first computer, which was a homemade desktop we dubbed Calvin Clone that weighed a proverbial f***-ton (and for some reason, had lumpy/pokey things on the bottom that made it painful to pick up and move) and that moved at the speed of slow. It had two 5.25" floppy drives and I eventually installed a 3.5" drive on it when those became available.

When you played Othello at the "beginner" setting (I played it a lot) it took a minute or two to make its move. If you tried playing it at the "master" setting, it could actually take five to seven days for it to make its move.

I kid you not.

You could turn the thing on and then walk away while it booted and start a pot of water on the stove for tea. If you pushed the "turbo" button, it would move just a hair faster. Not that that meant much. The thing only had 640k of RAM in it. When I finally added more RAM (which had to be paired, mind you), I paid $120 for each stick of 1MB of RAM.

The Bard's Tale ran fairly well on it, as well as Might and Magic (do you remember those original games?), and I also liked text-based games like Planetfall (FLOYD HERE NOW!) and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Now I couldn't pay someone to use the thing as a doorstop. To say it would be obsolete today is the greatest of understatements.

And now I think of all the young people who have grown up never knowing a time when there was no internet. Young people who are old enough to drink alcohol. They really don't realize how good they have it now. They've grown up spoiled by the ease with which they can access information on reasonably fast internet devices.

What will the future hold for us in twenty years' time? What new things wait for us on that technological horizon?

I'm looking forward to it.