The Future is Now: Part 1

I have titled this, the future is now: part 1, because this is the kind of topic that easily lends itself to further posts as time goes by.


I am 57 years old and there are many things I see and study about that I was never sure would happen in my whole life time!


I am a former computer guru. I call myself a former one cuz I have been out of the field for some years now, but that, as well as many other fields, is the kind of situation where if you haven't been kept up to date, even for just a few months in some cases, you seem to have lost touch with the field.

I was up to date 12 years ago. I was building the latest machines from scratch. Doing upgrades and also going to people's homes and offices to teach them how to use this new fangled machine!

In those days the Internet had just started. No one knew if it was a fad or would actually go somewhere. You may have noticed it did go somewhere, maybe to the point of being one of the most influential revolutions in history!

When I first got into computers I sometimes found myself saying, that will never happen, or they will never be able to do that. It didn't take me long to realize that we were dealing with something like had never been seen before and I stopped saying never!

As I bought parts to build computers I noticed that parts where going 10 times faster and costing half as much. This is one of the few fields that that has happened in my lifetime. Before that it seemed that everything was always going up in price. My personal computer that I am writing this on is 100 times faster than my first computer 15 years ago, and it cost less to build!

We also have Moore's law in the mix. That law says that they way things are going, computing speeds are going to double every year and a half or 2 years,

Most people who read this have a cell phone that has more computing power than the computer they took with them to land on the moon!

Include the power and speed of computers and the exponential growth of the Internet and the future indeed is now! The Internet has billions of websites with 100s of thousands or millions of new sites being added every day.

It started out with main frame computers that filed a whole room just to compute the smallest little things to get on the Net, to today, where anywhere in the world is pretty much open to tie you to the whole rest of the world, in real time on your cell phone!

I enjoyed writing this and admit I am amazed how the future has unfolded. I have said many times to people that the more you understand how computers work, the less you can believe that they can do it!

We have just started this new century, but I do sincerely believe that we need to get used to the idea of science and technology amazing us. It is the new norm!

Thank you,

Dave Briggs