Computer Memory Dreams

Coincidental today to buying a 1 T external hard drive to add to my fleet of three other (lesser) externals, I found something I wrote on February 16, 1984. I just want to quote a little bit of it. The computer I had then was either a VIC-20 or a Commodore 64. I mention storing programs on both cassette or on a disc drive. I know my VIC-20 used a cassette system, but when I had the 64, at some point, I also had a disc drive. Anyway, I don't remember which I had at the time.

Everything below this paragraph is from my 1984 article:

Home technology. Computers and the like. Where'd they come from? What are they for? Where are they going? Are they indispensable?

[BIG SNIP]

We who keep up on computers are told that memory constraints will one day be a thing of the past. We'll have millions of bytes to store our programs in. So what will we have stored in them? Longer versions of what I described above [games, educational programs]. Encyclopedia articles.

Will one have to sit and wait for a cassette to load for 45 minutes before using one of these massive programs? Or with a disc drive... will we need a separate disc to store each of these programs? The possibilities seem nauseating at this stage, and often I think we're chugging along toward them just because we're told how wonderful they will be.

Are we continuously to be updating our equipment to employ every new advance from the manufacturers. It's a matter of choice, of course. The hobbyist who digs it can buy what she or he affords and assumes they need. The family who knows little of what's going on and never finds uses for the computer that jibe with their original expectations may drop out. New families will take their place along the corridor of time. They'll open the door like their predecessor, step out momentarily and go back inside.

[I said word processing was probably the nicest function of homer computers. I wrote about the downside of storing articles on computer discs because they can be easily destroyed. Paper is more permanent.]

As I wrote that the tv screen blinked (as there's a flaw in this guy's program or in the computer itself) and I thought that perhaps my thoughts here would disappear.

[OK...that's the end of what I'm going to type from 1984].

2009 -- Now I think for sure this is when I had the Commodore 64. When I mentioned "this guy's program," that refers to a word processing program that I typed out of a computer magazine, line by line with checksum numbers. I can't think what it was called but it was a helpful program at the time. I myself had made a word processing program in BASIC, but the lines were simply arrays, so there could be no editing of, say, a paragraph without shifting each line. So it was not real useful.