In the beginning...
Computers were armored behemoths. Not long ago they took entire rooms, and once even an entire building.
They cost so much that even owning one seemed an achievement.
Some processes took long enough that you could make coffee, make love or make up for some lost sleep before the system would be responsive again.
We could prop our cars up on a tower case, and it was good.
Atari was your game console, Duran Duran ruled the airwaves.
The exodus.
Computers began to get smaller and lighter. But not by much.
They started wearing composite shells, plastic with a metal frame.
They cost a lot, but some people could afford to buy another in a year or two.
Some processes took long enough for you to sip your coffee or check your email before they were done.
We could somehow afford to buy music and computers and stay afloat. The price of gas was the same as a cup of coffee, or a little more.
Nintendo was your game console, and Guns and Roses was still a big name.
Wandering in the desert.
Computers begat laptops and laptops begat pdas. And cellphones slowly became the common headworm parasite. Laptops began stepping out of word processing arenas and towards replacing desktops. But the desktops had proliferated, and Windows had snuck up and suckpunched Macintosh. The internet grew up and then popped. And the stick mess remaining in 2/3 of its space, was pron. Napster became the channel for music and film, if you could afford broadband.
We all played playstation and mourned the loss of Nirvana.
Phoenix Rising.
Pdas begat mp3 players and mp3 players betrothed dvd players and brought forth pvps and psps and gadgets thought up by long time users of lsd. Many computers were now almost all plastic, bus speeds began to climb as did processor speeds. Pixel count and frame rate begame the topics young minds wandered. Suddenly roaring loud supercooled custom computers seemed almost cool, almost. IT careers were at their peak, and we all survived the Y2K bug better than we feared.
Xbox was here and PS2 was still better.
Future Outlook
Public information changes knowledge and public knowledge steers eternity. Modular systems begin to be developed, as do completely plastic or composite machines. Less and less moving parts, more light bridges and solid state drives push beyond theoretic processing limits. Laptops rule over desktops who in turn lumber off slowly in the powerful direction, laptops instead leaning on battery time and lightweight. Osx Cheetah and Windows Vista match consumer wits and find consumers becoming more and more informed. Crossplatform software suddenly becomes en vogue. Cell phones swallow up pdas and look hungrily and mp3 players and pvps. Canon will make a cellphone camera to spank all others. Some guy will make a motherboard chipset that runs at processor speed with integrated ddr8 256bit memory and totally forget we have run out of fossil fuel.
With every game console under our widescreen led-lcd's, and five portables in our laptop bag... video games became the drug of choice.
Its a good thing those laptops will weigh about a pounded, because we're gonna be using them on the bus.
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