| 1971
80 bytes (80 characters) |
In 1971 I was a soldier in the US Army, assigned to the headquarters
of the 15th Ordnance Battalion, in Darmstadt, in Germany. Back then you
would have said West Germany. My work was to report the inventory of conventional
ammunition on hand for the Fifth Corps -- about half the US troops in Europe
at the time. That reporting was done using punch cards, each of which could
store 80 characters of information. That was enough to indicate the type
of bullet or shell, the lot number it had been manufactured in, and the
location in the Battalion's storage depots.
To summarize the information, I had to write computer programs for a UNIVAC computer. It was the first time I had been paid to write a computer program, and the first time I had written in any language but BASIC. I had to learn assembly language alone and at night, as the computer belonged to the Personnel battalion next door, and I only had use of it after midnight. |
| 1981
80 thousand bytes (80,000 characters) |
In 1981 I was in the Marketing Department at Mohawk Data Sciences,
in Parsippany, New Jersey. Mohawk was (at least in its own eyes) an IBM
competitor in the marketplace for data entry equipment. My primary task
was competitive analysis: discovering and reporting the prices and features
of the products of our competitors. I had also, however, taken on the task
of creating forecasts of future sales, based on analysis of past years
of sales.
I wrote forecasting tools in BASIC, and ran many of the analyses on my own computer. I had purchased an Osborne 1; it was the second time I had spent $1800 on a computer, and it would not be the last. (My first personal computer had been an $1800 Altair in 1976. I sold its last remaining parts as antiques, on Ebay, last year.) Friends have told me that they've had the same experience -- spending $1400, or $2100, or so, several times a few years apart. Always the same amount but dramatically more computer horsepower each time. The Osborne computer had two 80 thousand byte diskette drives. Usually, one diskette held the program, the other the data. Since you would typically keep the live spreadsheet contents and one backup on the diskette, each spreadsheet was limited to about 40 thousand characters. |
| 1991
80 megabytes (80,000,000 characters) |
In 1991 I was Executive Director of the Center for Information Age
Technology at New Jersey Institute of Technology. My use of computers had
narrowed, for the moment, to office applications: word processing, spreadsheets
(including a new version of the same Supercalc that I had used on the Osborne),
and databases.
During this time I was also using desktop publishing: Computers and printers had evolved to the point where good-looking brochures, flyers, and documentation could be produced on a personal computer, and only the final printing delegated to professionals with offset presses; they would work right from masters produced on a laser printer. A powerful desktop computer of this era had 80 megabytes of storage. |
| 2001
80 gigabytes (80,000,000,000 characters) |
In 2001 I was -- and up to the present time still am -- University
Webmaster at Fairleigh Dickinson University. It is in many ways a dream
job, as it includes
. creating and editing content of web pages for the University . opportunity to design the appearance of those pages . opportunity to teach webmaster skills as an adjunct instructor . programming, usually in the Perl language, to offer special functionality on the website. Powerful desktop computers are now hard to distinguish from what used to be called minicomputers, and can be used to host even busy websites like FDU's. A large desktop computer might have as much as 80 gigabytes of storage. |
W. Kennedy
kennedy@fdu.edu