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I began watching them more closely in 2005, after I considered buying a PowerMac in 2001, when news broke of their impending transition to x86 Intel processors. It wasn’t until 2008 I finally purchased my first Macintosh, a unibody MacBook Pro, after a terrible experience attempting to get a new Dell laptop, with a defective hinge and display, serviced under warranty. I was so enamored with it, in 2004 I purchased iPod minis for all of my family members. My personal experience with Apple began in 2003 with my first purchase of the iPod. So, back to the Motorola/IBM PowerPC and Apple… While I may not be as involved, or indulgent, as I once was, my knowledge has managed to keep pace with the speed of the industry.

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I was in my middle teens when I was first truly interested in owning, servicing and upgrading my own PC and was well into my 20’s by the time I had enough money and access, while stationed in Japan, to afford most of what I wanted to do in the realm of desktop computing. Not just that, but I was a hobbyist who owned much of it and at least every bit that I’ve mentioned so far. When it eventually died, I disassembled it to discover it used a non-removable SD card internally to store the music files.Īll of this is to say that I’ve been around and witnessed first-hand these evolutions in computing hardware. My first MP3 player was a Casio WMP-1 that looked like a G-Shock wristwatch but could store and play up to 16MB of music. I still remember the first time I saw an SD card, back then known widely as “Secure Digital.” It shook my world to see a whopping 8 MEGABYTES on a tiny card. Related to that being the PATA ribbon cables for hard disks being supplanted with SATA, which itself is now being made scarce with the advent of consumer-grade SSDs appearing just over a decade ago, now running mostly on PCI-e due to exceeding the 6Gbit limit of SATA. I’ll come back to this in a sec.ĭon’t even get me started on serial, SCSI and parallel ports I’m just glad Apple’s enthusiasm for USB pushed the industry to adopt it and make it ubiquitous. Speaking of RAM, I watched what became ubiquitous evolve from EDO DRAM to SDRAM, the introduction of Rambus DRAM and DDR SDRAM with the former dying out in the early 2000’s while the latter is going on its 5th generation, and now GDDR and other high speed graphics RAM. I also witnessed the supremacy of x86, eventually taking over for the RISC PowerPC processors in Apple computers after a 15+ year run, and then the transition to 圆4, aka 64-bit addressing so CISC processors could address more than 4GB of RAM. That wasn’t new to me as I had previously watched ISA slots go from “mandatory” to dead in the decade prior. I had a 3dfx Voodoo and nVidia GeForce graphics cards, first for PCI and then for the newly adopted AGP bus, only to see AGP die when it was replaced with PCI-e. I then watched that cache get integrated onto the die for the Pentium III, skyrocketing prices that led to the first rise of AMD as a serious contender with the Athlon and Intel’s countering with the Celeron to foreshadow the coming age of cheap computing. I began with an Intel i486dx, moved on to a Pentium Pro, then Pentium II on a processor card with inline L2 cache. I remember buying the first discrete 3D graphics card and connecting it inline, externally, with a VGA cable. I was also a hobbyist that rode the second wave of the internet, when the World Wide Web became a thing and the internet experienced was a little less text and a little bit graphical.

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I watched cockpits convert from dials to glass, monochrome CRTs become full color LCDs and multiple systems weighing over a half ton combined be replaced by a single housing containing multiple systems integrated onto individual daughter cards. I can’t talk specifics, but I witnessed computing evolve over the past 30 years, from single task, power hungry and hot running processors all bussed in a small network so these large, ruggedized computing platforms can all output their information onto a single display, to “multi-mission” computing platforms that eliminated the bus through miniaturization due to greater efficiency, improved computing power and the utilization of non-volatile, solid state memory. However, I do have a few years working on both in the defense industry, contributing to the development, and later supervising, the transition from second generation solid-state electronics to the current system of modular, multi-modal, integrated computing systems on airborne weapons platforms.

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I’ve never worked in the tech industry, be it in software or hardware. I’m not a computer scientist or engineer.

Here’s where I have to talk about myself personally a little bit, which is something I don’t like doing.