My Computer History

Was looking forward to a nice lunch today but that didn't come true because I forgot I had to attend a meeting during lunch time. So I ended up having vegetarian food at the canteen, somewhere I haven't been in for months.

This week, we are sadden by the demise of Steve Jobs. Remarkably talented, creative and visionary man and only 56 :(. He succumbed to cancer. More facts and story about him on wiki can be found here.

Looking back at how I started using computers and later work with them daily, it is amazing how much the world of computers have change during a relatively short span of time. The first computer I used was in secondary school when I was a member of the Computer Club and even help wrote the school computer magazine which we named COMTEK. We have to start the computer with a floppy disk (the big flappy ones) and the language used was BASIC. And of course the screen were black and green only.

MAC Classic Color

Later on, I was introduced Mac in the Uni and it was in colour! It was nice to play with them in the computer lab. I still remember that I was so envious of my friend whose parents could afford to buy her an IBM PC, a 486 at nearly RM5K at that time. Probably with a 16MB RAM and a few hundred MB of HD. I was finally able to get a PC (a clone one, Pentium I only) when I was in my final year (I think it cost like 2K) and it was great. Spent hours on it using a dail-up to connect to ICQ and stuff. I was really getting into computers then. I was doing a Genetics Degree and my professor would always come asking me for help on his PC when he has trouble using his software on his great new PC. I was more than happy to help him out. Once, he even advised me to get into computers which I eventually did. I went back to do a PG course in Computer Science and after years of part-time study completed my Masters in the same field.

Now, many years down the road, I still deal with computers on a daily, only that the specs have improved, a lot, like a ton! Computers are getting faster, the colour screens are getting better, lighter & thinner, the storage are getting a whole lot bigger, so talk about terabytes now instead of MB. RAM goes into gigabtyes too.

For many years I dealt mainly with PCs, and very little with Apple stuff. Until recently, I got hooked on iPhone and iPad. Both are marvelous products, beautiful and work perfectly. So it's extremely sad to hear that Steve Jobs is no longer with us, God bless his soul.