37 years of informatics after, still looking forward! [Happy Birthday Steemit!]
Steemit is one year old (on friday 24) and I'm really older. No, I'm not talking about my age: I'm older as a man that uses daily informatics devices. Ok, today almost everyone (at least in the richest zones of the world) uses daily a smartphone or something.
But today I'm thinking to that old devices I started to use back in 1980. What was that? We have no WWW at that time, but, yes, it was an interconnetted machine. Videotex, they called it. A little terminal that let you read and write in a bunch of pages - commercial, forum, chat - where you found other people.
No, it was not a computer. Just a terminal. My first computer was the Apple IIa. No hard disk, Ram 64KB. 2 floppy disk driver (5", the FLOPPY ones). It was in 1981, I think.
source: By Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11276454
Then I bought a ZX Spectum. Ram 48KB, magnetic tape as mass storage. There was a good chess software on the market, as far as I remembr. Cyrus, I think. It was better than a Zx80 or a Commodore64.
(source)
Then there were many IBM-like PCs, with some kind of DOS and a 8086 microchip. (Then a 80286, then 386, then 486, then Pentium I, II, III...). I don't want to talk about the software running on those computers (who remembers WordPerfect?) to not make it very long.
(by Konstantin Lanzet - CPU collection Konstantin Lanzet, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6589708)
When I started browsing the web, in 1997, I had an Intel286 assembled machine with an internal 11Kb/sec modem. The most used search engine around here was Altavista. Browser? Netscape Navigator, of course. Everything was soooo slow!
(By Netscape Communications Corp. (original icon). Gabriel dos Santos (SVG version). - This vector image was created with Inkscape., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=25163467)
Why am I writing about this old stuff? Becouse, see, 37 years after my first approach to the informatics world, I still see many things changing and many new things being born. Look at this Steemit baby! He has a long way to go. Is't it amazing? ;)