Okay, so here I am, updating from the open WiFi network in the house in BelAir. Housesitting is weird – there’s nothing much that I’m responsible for, there’s no one to talk to, and the space is unfamiliar. The upside is that it’s actually a very comfortable place (i’m not always comfortable in places this far outside of my pay grade) and there’s a pool. I’ve managed to drag a lounger out into the sun (none permanently live in the sun, oddly) and I’m finally settled enough to get into a routine. I’ll be doing some writing here for sure, as well as plenty of reading.
The other day I was thinking about the number of new things that computers can do for us and how far we’ve come just in my memory. Today’s reminiscence is of my freshman year of college. MP3 became widely known about then, and music came down in size fivefold, to about “a meg a minute.” That was like a magical number. You could suddenly store music for playback later on your computer. Mine was a Pentium 75mhz machine with 8mb of RAM and a 1.275gb HDD. that’s 1275mb. I have more than six times that much RAM in my workstation now. Anyway, the first players were so bad that you couldn’t multitask anymore (that’s what Windows95 promised, afterall), and when they released an update to WinAmp, we could suddenly listen to music while typing our papers. Now, we didn’t download music, really – how would we have done that – but we could upload and download from our online useraccounts on the “gl” server.
Tangentially, at the time, I was only dimly aware of the fact that the account on the “gl” server was actually access to another machine. I knew we all had folders there and that most of them were closed off, but that was about as far as it went. No, wait, I also knew that I had storage space that I controlled that wasn’t on my computer, but I never really leapt beyond that into anything like the “cloud” everyone’s talking about today – in my mind, that space was just for web stuff. I have been storing things in the cloud for a long time, but so has anyone with a clue – it’s just been recently that people figured out that by giving the thing a buzzword and selling it, we might create a new business.
Anyway, none of this is important at all – I just was thinking about it, and maybe, with as much as i’ve already forgotten (where did we get MP3s to listen to? Did we even, or was it just novelty?), I’ll lose more of these memories soon, too. Maybe they’re worth forgetting, too. I dunno.
