Precious Memory and Memories

When I grew up, computer memory was a precious resource. I bought a Radio Shack TRS-80 during the summer between high school and college. It came with 4KB of DRAM.

So now, each time I buy memory storage, I'm a bit amazed by the increasing amount and continually falling price.



I'm serious about backing up many of my key, Flickr albums locally. It is taking a while to have the service create ZIP files. Then I have to download, rename, and copy them. However, doing so will give peace of mind which seems worth the effort.

My Addiction Started Here

I have this notion that I should eventually be able to locate most of my personal details here at this site. Piece by piece, or rather entry by entry, I am creating a story of things which are important to me. Or in this case, I've got something which was important to me.

I know I've previously made mention of my first computer. I'll call it a computer although a modern calculator has about the same processing power. I didn't purchase my TRS-80 Model 1 at a Radio Shack store. I remember going to Manchester, NH to buy it at a large store that sold many types of computers of the time. It's been so long that I couldn't venture a guess as to what the other companies would have been.

I was in college, so money would have been precious, but I just had to have one of these. This was when a person had to learn BASIC to do anything useful on a computer. Games and programs used to come on cassette tapes. Hamarabi and backgammon come to mind. I remember writing a math flashcard-type program for kids. I brought it to my first teaching practicum in New London, NH in 1980. My supervisor wrote it up in my evaluation as "an interesting use of a teaching machine."

Making Things Work

Yesterday, I was most concerned about turning in the final marks for the course which had finished on Friday. This meant that although I didn't have to teach, it didn't feel much like a day off. Now I feel as though I'm really on vacation. I love having the whole day to do whatever I please.

I plan on requesting less teaching time next year. I think that nine contact-hours per week will be sufficient. I have my fingers crossed I can be assigned classes on just three afternoons per week starting in January. I won't know for sure until a few days before classes begin.

So what did I do with my free time today? I went in for my N1H1 flu shot. I sort of missed the previous panic but my doctor thinks there may be an uptick of cases over the next few months. Governments here have paid for all that vaccine, and I figured I might as well take advantage of it. I also walked from the uptown clinic to my credit union. I seldom stop in as I do nearly all of my banking online. I asked for about 30 empty penny rolls. It is time to wrap 'em and spend the twenty bucks towards something in New York City. Cathay Pacific will fly us there on Thursday evening.

I also picked up a new wireless router at London Drugs. I wanted one that could use the N band for when I get an 'around-the-house' laptop in January. I really do find fighting with computer equipment enjoyable. I haven't unpacked the D-Link box yet, as I'm busy copying some Sinhalese-language DVD's to take to Jay's bother in New York. Earlier, I also loaded a plug-in for Windows Media Center 7. It allows an easy way to have podcasts show up inside its interface.

I am very excited about Windows 7 acting as my media hub. I am hoping that I will find accessible Over-The-Air HDTV channels from my location with the antenna I have on order. If I get reception, I'd love to get a new duel HDTV tuner to use for recording and watching. Finally two of my favourite things are going to be joined at the hip: computers and television. Combine OTA and blossoming Internet television, and I just might be able to dump my satellite receiver all together. Since the days of my Radio Shack TRS-80, I've found pleasure in making PC's do my beck and call. I am constantly busy as they seem to do more and more. I guess, people truly are not the same, are they?


My graphics card is connected directly to my HDTV.

Screen Tests

My new class doesn't start until next Monday. After last week's weird and wacky weather, things really started to look up today. In retrospect, even though it's only six o'clock, I cannot believe I spent so much time in front of this screen. I suppose I have to come to terms with the fact, I'm rather addicted to computers. As I'll be turning 49 years old in July, you'd think I would know myself well by now.

I guess it really wasn't a surprise to realize I am fascinated with PCs. I first spent hard-earned cash on a Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1980. The tasks I was able to do in those days weren't very inspiring by today's standards. I recall making a simple BASIC program that simply added one plus one and showed the result on the black and white screen. Then, it would add one more and print again. I let it run overnight and I couldn't believe the device had made it into the hundreds of thousands by morning.

Technology marches on. Today, I was playing with my computer, network, and PS3. I was using TVersity to make my PS3 into a media server. I downloaded video from the Internet through a BitTorrent. Moving around 600 megabyte files is probably something I wouldn't have thought possible when my Radio Shack had 16K of RAM. The fact most of these files were destined for a 16x9 format 42" LCD television screen, would've undoubtedly sounded like science fiction too.

Here's my belated tribute to the recently deceased futurist who lived his last fifty years in Sri Lanka:

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
-- Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008)
Profiles of The Future, 1961

This show is not a video file. It's a live program streamed through
the net from a Sri Lankan TV network to this aparment in
New Westminster, BC.

On the Fly ...

For decades, I've been doing school work on my home computer, but only recently have I been doing the reverse. I am logged onto the BCIT network now.

I first bought a $300 Radio Shack TRS-80 in 1980. I don't think that I would've even dreamed there'd be so much hardware on the planet in just two and a half decades. Bill talked about having one of these suckers on every desk, but it's obvious we surpassed that goal. How many personal computers are there per capita in North America? (That's a question I can probably answer in a matter of minutes after I exit www.blogger.com and get to a search engine.)

It is time again for my library exercise. I'm down in the COMPUTER COMMONS. I take every class for an hour-long project in the library on the Burnaby campus. As I generally teach 5-week, intensive courses, I find myself here nearly every month. I do like the atmosphere in libraries.

A few of my Communications students would never set foot in this building were it not for this assignment. At this point in my course, we hit materials that emphasize the use of comparative structures. They are here to observe a location that meets some criteria for successful studying. In this week's assignment, they will compare their notes written here with those from another studying location.

Big Bytes

When given the chance to explain an idea, I gravitate towards words. Expressing ideas through mathematics was never a forte. Yesterday's entry, about adding RAM to my computer, prompted me to dust off a calculator. I blithely mentioned having a gigabyte and a half of memory now. Somehow, this number no longer seems astronomical as digital cameras and mp3 players now sport comparable numbers.

Still, from a historical perspective, that's a lot of memory. I could probably use RAM size as a means of sequencing events in my life. For example, when moving to Canada, my computer had just 128 megabytes. Further back, in the middle of my tenure at the Higher Colleges of Technology, the average computer had 2 megabytes. Retreating to my first IBM compatible reminds me that I once did all my computing in 640K because the space between there and one megabyte was used for 'system housekeeping'. Wait, I can go back further to college days! My trusty and true TRS-80 had a whopping 16 kilobytes which is about the same as the file of this calculator image. I had upgraded the Radio Shack device from an original 4K.

Let's take a look at the bytes represented in those abbreviations:

TRS-80 Model 1
4,096 bytes

RAM in Current PC
1,536,000,000 bytes

Damn, my calculator doesn't have enough digits! Again, remembering that I'm no math genius, I think that's an increase of around three hundred and seventy five thousand percent. I wish my bank account had increased as dramatically in the last 25 years!