The Scrivener: Looking Back, Further Back, And Forward
…Computers assembled by people in little back rooms were by no means reliable. This one lasted for slightly over the year of its guarantee period and then stopped functioning. The man who assembled it charged me a fee to have it running on his bench all day and tell me that is was in perfect working order. I took it home. It didn't work….
Brian Barratt tells of the computers in his life and wonders what the future holds by way of invention and innovation.
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In the 1980s, an IBM desktop computer arrived on my desk at the Melbourne office, out of the blue. A chunky beast with two 5¼ inch floppy disk drives, a large printer, and software I had no idea what to do with. Fortunately, one of my colleagues was already computer-literate so, between us, we got the hang of the word processor, DisplayWrite.
In those days a floppy disk held just over one megabyte of data. If I understand it aright, that's about a million tiny items of information such as letters of the alphabet and numbers. Today I have received an update, for my current computer, which occupies about a gigabyte of space on my hard disk. That's the equivalent of about 1,000 floppy disks. In USA terms, that's roughly a billion tiny pieces of information. In traditional British terms, it's merely one thousand million, three noughts short of a billion.
When the usefulness of the office computer became apparent, I bought my own. It was an Epson with two floppy disk drives but far more attractively designed than the IBM. Naturally, it became obsolete fairly rapidly, so I invested in one of the many PC-clones which were then on the market. And I made a dreadful mistake.
Computers assembled by people in little back rooms were by no means reliable. This one lasted for slightly over the year of its guarantee period and then stopped functioning. The man who assembled it charged me a fee to have it running on his bench all day and tell me that is was in perfect working order. I took it home. It didn't work.
In spite of that, some clones were cheaper and perhaps more versatile than the original IBM PCs, so I hunted around for a reliable one made by a company with a good reputation and national sales. I found a very nice one. Of course, it became obsolete and could not be upgraded or added to. Not at a reasonable cost, anyway.
Computer no. 4 was a clone which was reported by thousands of users as the most reliable of all desktop computers then available in Australia. It was assembled in Sydney and had a whole three megabytes of capacity on its hard disk, plus a 5¼ inch floppy disk drive, a 3½ inch floppy disk drive, and the new wonder of modern science, a compact disk drive. It was also very much faster than its predecessors although its 'Turbo' drive was hundreds of times slower than present-day desktop computers. That machine is still here on my desk and is still used.
It has the easy-to-use but outdated Microsoft DOS operating system and an early version of Microsoft Windows, and is free of excessive complications and the surplus clutter of current software programs.
It was good enough for me to use when writing my first book for gifted and talented children, with a DOS-based desktop publishing program. There isn't room here to explain the significance of that. Let's just say that good graphics programs which did not need Windows were rare in those days unless you chose a Macintosh instead of an IBM clone. I'd already watched a friend write her first book on a Macintosh with a tiny ten-inch screen and decided that definitely wasn't for me.
I upgraded No. 4 as far as I could and needed something more powerful and versatile for the work I was doing. Computer no. 5 became necessary. I played safe and, after inspecting everything on the market in relation to my limited budget, I bought a big name brand model with more capacity, speed, features, bells and whistles, than I'd experienced in the previous machines. But things started going wrong.
What with this, that and the other, I came to dread starting my early morning writing sessions. This wouldn't start; that wouldn't run; the other just stopped in its tracks. It took too long for me to realise that the problem was not with the computer itself but in the version of Windows which was in the machine. It was Windows ME. When I read the words of a well respected local computer writer, the light dawned. Quoth he: 'Windows ME is a virus unto itself'.
So here I am, typing these words on no. 6, with Windows XP. After about 25 years of dealing with obsolescence, upgrading, improving and starting again. It's very nice, thank you. For the time being.
Meanwhile, I've pondered the world-changing innovations which appeared when my father was a similar age. When he was aged about the same as I was when I bought my first computer, television was invented. When he was 65, the first computer was unveiled at Harvard. When I was 65, I linked to the Internet and opened my first website. In between, when he was about 60, the first ballpoint pens came onto the market. When I was 60, the Soviet Union launched the first permanent manned space station.
Now I'm a triple great-great-uncle. I wonder what other innovation, invention and obsolescence will have occurred by the time those little ones reach the age of 60?
© Copyright Brian Barratt
