Happy 60th, "Modern Computer"

Sitting on a bench at school was a little, old-school laptop. I forget what kind it was, but when you opened it up, there was a card with 4MB inserted into the computer. This 2x2 inch card was adding to whatever the internal memory was. The screen was tiny and obviously not color. It was a funny sight; I don't know why it was there. But at least I recognized it and it didn't look too different from what I am using right now.

I came across this article as I was scanning my Google Reader. Now that computer was much different than mine here. How far have computers come in these 60 years? Well, I can't quite say to the extreme, since I don't know the figures on the newest and coolest computer. However, even a comparison to my laptop is amazing.

"Baby" had 128 bytes of memory, weighed one ton, took up a whole room, and used a cathode ray tube for memory. My Acer Aspire laptop here has 2 gigabytes RAM, weighs a few pounds, fits on my lap (hence a lap-top), and uses dynamic random access memory. I'm not sure how long it would take to program or compute "whether 2 to the power 127 minus 1 is a prime number" on my computer, but I can tell you, it's not one week programming and 25 minutes computing. Heck, at least both are better than 6 months for the human brain.

Thank you and congratulations to Frederic C. Williams, Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill for your work on the Small-Scale Experimental Machine. And thanks to all those who took that work and continued to add and refine computing into the amazing machines we have today!