Two Views on Technological Change

by Tom Palmer on July 12, 2007

Via Andrew Sullivan, I saw this delightful 1982 essay by James Fallows on the wonders of “The Electric Pen,” which reminded me of my own first gigantic “luggable” Compaq computer, which I think I got in 1984. It had no hard drive and two 5.25 inch floppy disk drives, one for the program disk and one for the storage disk. In the word processor, all formatting had to be done by entering various odd characters. (My screen, unlike James Fallows’, was gold, rather than green.)

And via Nathalie Vogel, I was directed to this very funny video on a medieval help desk:

Medieval%20Help%20Desk.jpg

{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }

Valerie July 12, 2007 at 6:43 pm

Thank you Tom and Nathalie! I was looking at a slim cell phone with 64 mb ram, as big as the hard drive on my first Apple desktop.

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