the stampede of technological progress, part 3
In 1979, I moved to Berkeley and began attending school there. I was originally planning to major in astronomy, since I thought Carl Sagan was cool and it was fun to tell people I was going to be an astrophysicist. It seemed like a good idea to have a fall-back; a possible major that actually included job skills. So I took some classes in Computer Science.
I learned to write programs using Fortran IV. I don’t remember what the programs did, but I remember long hours of typing punch cards. When we were done, we’d hand the stack of cards to an operator. An hour or so later we’d get a printout with the results of the run. No program ever worked the first time, so we’d try to fix the problem, punch some more cards, lather, rinse, repeat.
The mainframe which used punch cards was old even in 1979. The next semester we moved on to Pascal and a Unix system with actual CRT terminals. This was the first sytem I used which bore a resemblance to a modern computer. It could process words. It had a system-wide proto-email capability. The terminals looked sorta like modern computers.
One of the interesting things about comparing technology then and now is just how bad the prognosticators were. I clearly recall one of my professors saying “we’ve made great strides in recent years in storing more and more information in less and less space, but we shouldn’t expect that trend to continue. We’re running into real physical limits.” Yup, sure enough, a 5-1/2 inch floppy disc with a capacity of 110KB is still state of the art. Yessiree.
The newer, more powerful computers were going to usher in a new era of artificial intelligence. Previously intractable computing problems were going to be solved very soon. We were going to have robots which walked gracefully on two legs, could play catch, could speak and understand natural languages, and could recognize faces. Alas, the intractable problems of artificial intelligence remain pretty much intractable, although Big Brother uses the latest facial recognition software to find people who look sorta kinda like bad guys so they can ship them off to Egypt to get tortured. Progress. Not always good.
Tags: stampede