RIVER BENDER - June, 2007

They keep on working: Well, most of the time. Considering that a PC has over 200 million transistors it's mind-boggling that it doesn't fail every time you turn it on. Remember vacuum tubes in your radio and TV and how and you had to take a bag full of them to a tube-tester at the drug store to find out which one was bad? And car radios had an even shorter life. Computers are very reliable now. So are TV sets, thanks to transistors and integrated circuits.

They get cheaper and more powerful: As more transistors are put on a chip the cost for each transistor reduces and processing power increases. Moore's Law in 1965 speculated that the number of transistors on a chip would double every two years and it turned out to be right. But we haven't seen anything yet! Wait until molecules are made into working transistors.

They're fun and easy to use: We've come a long way from seeing boring white text on a black screen to colorful screens with icons that can be selected with a mouse. Sure beats using a keyboard, which someday will probably be replaced with voice recognition.

Moving data around by copy/pasting is a slam-dunk! Not a day goes by that I'm not moving information from one place to another in my computer or between computers using copy/paste. I recall back in the '70s hearing that someday we'd be doing this and now it's here and taken for granted.

The Internet is mind-boggling: Without the Internet, computers would still be fun and productive, but the Internet, and especially the world-wide-web, provides icing on the cake. It's awesome that we can communicate anywhere on this earth and not give a thought about distance or cost. And I love Google, the great search engine that finds the answer to just about any question you give it. How in the world do they do that? As a programmer years ago I recall how tough it was to write efficient code to search and sort data.

What I dislike:

Slow to turn on and off: I'm impatient. Each of my new computers has been far more powerful and faster than the previous one but much slower to turn on and off. Waiting several minutes really annoys me. My TV set comes on instantly so why shouldn't my PC? Why don't they use non-volatile flash memory like used in USB memory sticks, digital cameras and mobile phones and speed things up? Well, there are reasons, of course, but I'm hoping it won't be too long before the problem is solved.

Too much garbage: Why are people allowed to disrupt the Internet with so much spam and viruses and get away with it? Federal and state laws are passed to fix the problem and it just gets worse. A new approach to handling data has got to be devised or we're going to see Internet service providers driven out of business processing so much spam they can't handle customers' traffic.

Archival media keeps changing: What media can I use to save treasured photos and information in that will last? I've saved stuff on 8mm film, 35mm slides, 5 1/4" floppies, 3 1/2" floppies, CDs and DVDs and they all become obsolete over time. Paper is probably the best bet for archival storage. It doesn't last forever but it's easier than etching in stone. We need a solution for long-term archival storage.

Security updates are becoming larger: Everybody wants their PC to be updated with the latest security fixes from Microsoft. But if you don't have high-speed Internet access it takes an awful long time to download them. One update was over 8MB, which would take over 20 minutes for a dial-up user to download. I guess Microsoft doesn't care about dial-up users anymore.