My First Home Computer
Photo Source: Me

When I first started to use a computer, which was some time ago, it was a box that did a few things badly. As I think about it, I acquired my first home computer around 1981. It was a Sinclair ZX-81 with a 1 K memory and a membrane keyboard. It was small, so small in fact that when I opened the box it was in, I was severely disappointed. It was certainly underpowered. You had to hook it up to a tv and you got a black and white picture. About the most powerful thing you could do with this computer was make a clock appear on the screen. The problem was you had only enough computing power to simulate one hand, so your big accomplishment was a clock with only an hour hand. As weak as this machine was, it did have a rudimentary form of basic and it came with a book on programming and instructions. When a few of my fellow co employees found out about it, they ordered one also.

Boy have we come a long way since those days. Today the computer has become an entertainment center. The old Sinclair had no way of loading in any data unless you purchased a tape player and found some way of purchasing prerecorded tapes that contained programs that would run on it. The problem was that there were none out there. The best you could hope for were programs that amateur programmers wrote. Today, of course, you have a wide range of computer programs to chose from. You can run your business, if you have one, from your computer by loading it up with office productivity programs. Heck, you can even run all you bank accounts from it and print your own checks. It's funny, I always thought that banks had to cash any check, even if it was made out on a paper bag, and this may be true, but years ago I printed my own checks and they were white, but contained all the appropriate information. Everyone that I sent one to accepted them without a problem except the local water company who sent one back to me. It seemed that some clerk didn't like the color and told me, when I called, that the bank refused to honor the check. I knew this wasn't true because I had been cashing these checks in the same bank for three months before the water bill was due. The moral of the story is, if you print a check, make sure it isn't white.

Getting back to computers, it is just amazing the things you can do on them. Watching dvds seems very routine today, but watching any type of a movie on a home computer several years back would have been impossible. The computers just weren't fast enough. Even after the desktops were able to do it, some of the laptops lagged behind. They had dvd players but the movies ran so slow as to be unwatchable. I tried to watch a Star Trek I had recorded, on an old laptop that had a dvd player and it was torture. Now you can get a machine with a media center and not only watch tv, but record it, roll back the live scenes, play dvds, play recorded tv shows and much more. You were able to do these things before the media center came out, but it is much more organized now and easier to do. I have a large tv in my living room which I usually watch, it has a dvd recorder and a sound system attached to it, so I usually watch tv there, but in a pinch I can watch it on my 22 inch wide flat screen monitor which has a beautiful picture. This comes in mighty handy when visitors are here for other family members.

Who needs a telephone if you have a computer? With all these free services that allow you to talk to people for free that have the same service and to even see them at the same time, there is really getting to be less and less need for a conventional telephone. I have been after my kids that live out of state to do this for years now, but they insist on calling instead. I don't understand it, but I am always happy to hear from them. One of them was telling me that he had a hard time connecting so I found a site that you could hook up through. It was so easy to do. I told him about it and he never tried. Oh well.

Computers are becoming an incredible tool for people that like to take photos. All you need is a digital camera and the right software such as Photoshop Elements which you can usually purchase for less than $100.00 and away you go. You can create photo albums to keep your precious photos in and even before you put them in these albums you can tweak the photos to make them perfect. One example of this is the automatic "redeye" fixer. Another feature is the color balancer which lets you get the tones just right. Got a photo with stuff in it you don't like, but you want the part that has someone dear to you in it? Just crop the photo and extract the part you want and you will have a new photo with only that person in it. This stuff would have taken a photo lab hours to do in the past, not to mention the expense of it all. I usually store my photos on dvds, but I put the family photos on a website where they are kept for all my relatives all over the country and in Europe to see. It is very handy and they can download any photos they want and even print them out. The great part of this is that everyone has a computer now and can do this.

Read a good book lately? If you don't mind reading it on a computer screen, there are tons of books out there to read. You can read the classics or even books that were just written. Oh you might have to pay to read just released popular books, but there is much to read out there for free. You can also buy books on cd. I received an offer of 10,000 books on cds for $29.95 the other day. If you go to school, there is much source material on the net. You can also buy educational material on disks, usually cds. One of the worries in schools right now is the copying of term papers. It seems that there are hundreds of thousands of term papers on the internet and some people just can't resist the temptation of downloading them to avoid having to do work. Usually the schools deal harshly with anyone they catch doing this.

Music is another area that the computer now excels in. There are many different places that you can download it from. After it is downloaded you can either play it on your computer, I am assuming you have a decent sound card and speakers, or upload it to a device or disk so that it can be played somewhere else. This is one of those areas that has become super popular in the last few years as computers have become more capable.

I never thought that I would possess so much computing power that I could give some of it back to science, so it could be used to help with calculations, but that is what has happened to most of us. As we purchased newer and newer computers, we acquired more powerful machines. Much of the time these machines sit on our desks doing nothing. Scientific enterprises like SETI, The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence, runs calculations on all the signals they receive from their radio telescopes. They are looking for signals that might be from another race. They have created a screen saver for a computer that will do these calculations in the background of someone's computer when it is not being used. As soon as you press a key this all stops and the computer is returned to your use. With all the computers out there that are signed up to do this, they have the most powerful computer system in the world. It is nice to be part of something like this.

My Current Gateway Dual Core Powerhouse
Photo Source: Me

Communicating with others has become very popular through things like instant messaging and message boards. Communities of people doing this have been created. I myself belong to a hockey message board. A person can find any topic that interests him or her on a message board somewhere. Along with this are the blogs. Some people find it fascinating to read reports on the days of others and even comment. If you are interested in communication you can even organize a newsletter. I have seen some warnings about doing research on the internet, but I believe it is a good place to start. You have to be careful and make sure that what you are quoting is correct, but aside from this, it gives you ideas. You can track packages, look up zip codes and even print stamps. Yes things have sure changed from that day when I purchased that Sinclair.