Fascinating history of the computer

[LONDONER]

My my, how things have changed. Look at the size of that hard disc and laser printer!

http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/38IkpL/MZL...-pictures/

[East]

LOL...reminds me of that dreadful "Intro to Computers" class I had in college...I had to drop out and take it over twice (dropped out those times as well).......

It started out each time like a black and white monotone class from the 1940s...I thought it was a bit like the Twilight Zone. I was OK through the history part and the Hewitt Packard part but once they got into "chips" my mind couldn't wrap around it.

[MikeW]

In 1974-75 when I first moved here to Berkeley I took a job as an attendant for quadriplegics. This was through an agency that mostly serviced students at CAL. I had several clients but one, a student in the computer science department who was confined to a wheelchair and had limited use of his arms and hands, had a terminal and modem in his apartment. I'm not exactly clear how it worked but his terminal operated through his telephone. He'd take the receiver off the phone and put it on a cradle, dial a phone number which connected to a mainframe on campus via audible signals. He could then interact though his keyboard and monitor with the mainframe. It would be another 20 years before I became interested in computers but I always remember this as a 'first encounter'.

[Jake]

My first computer was Vic 20 from Commodore, second was a Coco TRS-80, then I got a Tandy 1000sx, IBM 80286, 80386, Pentium 50, Pentium 100, Pentium 2, 3, 4 and so on and so forth. I work with mainframes, supercomputers, servers. And right now I have in my personal collection 25 high end servers and 12 laptops. Yes I am a crazy IT lol.

[guy398964]

Thanks for sharing those images.
I work with computers and had no ideia things looked so ugly in the beginning lol

[Bluelight]

When I was born, computers had already become a common household product, but they have already come so far. I remember being 2-3 years old and playing with my dad's discarded floppy-disks; I would slide the metal thing over and try to open them thinking that there would be a letter inside (my dad's computer would announce "YOU GOT MAIL!" all the time, so naturally I thought they were letters), but to my disappointment, that never happened