Develpoments in Computers

The computer hardware that I first encountered was a huge machine which cost a lot of money and needed a fully air-conditioned room. The size was dictated more by the fact that these machines employed cathode ray tubes which radiated a lot of heat. Their computing power and also data storage capacity was considered huge at that time. Hence, it was the huge entities like the United States Census office which first utilized them.

The input data were contained in what were referred to then as “punch cards”. They were so named because the cards were in fact punched with holes to represent the data. Once these punch cards have outlived their usefulness, the children of those times converted them into toys. I recall having made a belt out of these punch cards myself.

From these gigantic machines, personal computers were developed due to innovations with the use of silicon chips. However, the capability of these machines were also quite limited when compared with the latest generation of computers. The very first personal computer I purchased was an Apple IIe. I remember paying $3,000 for the privilege of owning one. I used this computer in preparing the budget of the offshore operations of PCIBank in Hong Kong. At that time, data was stored in 51/2 floppy disks which I believe could accommodate only about 32 kilobytes of data. Hence, it was not unusually for me to use four or five of these floppies for a single year projections. And the way the data was read by the software, I had to switch floppies between the two hard drives. I recall the I was using a software called Multiplan for the spreadsheet, Dbase for data management, and

The first portable computer was introduced sometime in 1984 by IBM. these machines were called transportables and they were the size of the largest hand carry luggage as we know them now. The computer screen was about a foot measured diagonally. I had one of those too. But at the end of the day, I found it ridiculous lugging the transportable whenever I had to travel because of its size and weight.

Things sure have changed over the past twenty seven years. The computing power and the ability to have data stored right inside the computer of a single laptop have exceed those of the old mainframes. The change was made very apparent to me when I revisited the UP Computer Center to get my access code and password to use the CRS. The very first time I was at the Center was when I had to write an optimization program for a course I was then taking for my MBA. This was in 1973. At that time, the entire building housed the school’s huge mainframe. When I went back in 2007, what I saw were just laptops and these were apparently sufficient for the purpose. The building seemed empty to me.