52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy & History - Week #8 - Technology

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy History by Amy Coffin is a series of weekly blogging prompts (one for each week of 2011) that invite genealogists and others to record memories and insights about their own lives for future descendants. From Geneabloggers.

52 Weeks of Personal Genealogy History - Week #8 - Technology. What are some of the technological advances that happened during your childhood? What types of technology to you enjoy using today, and which do you avoid?

A lot has happened in my lifetime. I went from a home with a black and white TV with 3 channels to flatscreened color TV's in every room with 200 channels. I've seen the old black telephone with a party line and the first cell phone that was the size and weight of a car battery to super slim cellphones that can surf the Internet at the same time you talk on the phone! I've used paper spreadsheets on a desk with a calculator and now computerized spreadsheets that can be shared online. I went from no computers to computerized everything!

In 1986 I graduated from Spartanburg Technical College with an Associate's Degree in Accounting and Computer Operations. We had one room with personal computers and I remember only having one class in that room. The rest of the computer classes were talking about simple DOS programming, how to change tapes (on computers that filled an entire room), how to use punch cards, etc.

My mother bought a "word processor." The machine could only do word processing and the software program was on a floppy disk in a floppy disc drive and the data was saved on another floppy disk in a 2nd floppy disk drive. There were no hard drives.

At work, my first computer was an IBM like this one:

This did not have a hard drive but 2 5 1/4 floppy drives.



It was neat that I was able to find these photos of old computers on the Internet.

Soon I got a modification to my office computer. They removed one of the floppy drives and added a 10 Megabyte hard drive! I thought this was so coo at the timel!


It was about this time Stan and I bought our first personal computer for home. It had a 25 Mb hard drive and a 5 1/4 floppy drive. It had a primitive color monitor. It cost us about $2,500! It looked something like this:


Every couple of years I bought a new computer and upgraded to the newest and latest. Today I have 2 laptops and a desktop with a brilliant flat screen monitor. Instead of 256 kb of RAM, I have 8 Gb of RAM and instead of a 25 Mb hard drive I have a 1 Tb hard drive. Computer prices are at an all time low. Where I used to pay $2500, now I can get the latest computer for $700. I use a computer all day long, every day. I'm doing digital scrapbooking, genealogy searches, blogging, on Facebook, sending emails, on the Internet all the time. I can't imagine going back to being without a computer.