The Computer is too big

I have always been fascinated by the way computers have shrunk in size and increased in performance over the years. It was in 1838 when Charles Babbage invented the Analytical Engine. Ada Lovelace, known to be the first programmer, found out that the device could carry out an extensive sequence of mathematical operations. Her first program was to calculate one such sequence: Bernoulli numbers.

With each passing day, the computers evolved to 1st Generation, 2nd generation and so on. ENIAC, UNIVAC, PDP are the examples respectively.

Coming to 4th Generation computers. Most of us have used one at one point of time in our life or another. I still remember, when I was very young, my school lab had 3 of those. It used to run Microsoft Windows 95 (if I am not wrong, my memory is blurred). It was the first computer I used. Starting from using MS-Paint, LOGO, my interest in computers started to grow. I used a similar machine to learn my first programming language, BASIC. Mainly I was a self-learner though I asked my teachers for help whenever I got stuck somewhere. It was a time when we didn’t have internet. I mean, we didn’t have any smartphone or computer at home at that time. If we needed to access the internet, in emergency cases, we used to go to the cybercafé. Hence, I started to rely on books more. My school library, on the other hand, had an extensive collection of books. I grew the habit of relying more on books than anything else. The habit still remains. Even today, I would prefer reading a hundred pages of a program documentation to figure out something than to refer a video tutorial or to ask in a forum.

5th Generation computers have seen a huge upgrade with every passing day. Both my computers are 5th Generation – one of them is eleven years old, with specifications like Intel Core2Duo processor and DD2 2GB RAM. I went on upgrading the machine as the years passed – now I added a 1TB HDD, replacing the 256 GB one and have also added a GPU. However, the machine still remains more or less the same. It used to run Windows XP when we bought it. Later, we went on upgrading it to Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8 and then Windows 10. However, with the release of Windows 10 version 2004, the machine dropped support. It used to be terribly slow and I couldn’t run anything well on it, not to mention about the frequent BSODs. Hence, I decided to shift over to LINUX based distros on the PC. As of date, it runs LXLE, an extremely lightweight distro and much useful for day-to-day activities and application development. The second device I am using is a laptop bought just a few months back (after I got admitted to college). Till my school life, I used the desktop.

It is quite remarkable how the processor sizes are shrinking with each passing day – and so is the size of machines. The size of my cell phone is lesser than the size of just the RAM in my PC. My PC has 2GB of RAM while my phone has 6.

A few weeks back, a funny incident occurred. One of my old friends and I went to a computer repair shop as his laptop wasn’t working. As the repairman dismantled the machine and kept the Hard Disk on the table, I picked it up and said to my friend, “Dude, there was a time we used floppies of this size. When did hard disks become so small?” The repairman smiled at us and said, “Do you want to buy an 1TB microSD card?”

A fun fact: I still own a 2GB pendrive.

I just picked up the Raspberry Pi kept beside my table. Did you ever wonder when a fully functional computer got to the size of a credit card? Well, there are smaller ones as well.

These days, with the advent of embedded systems, a computer can get smaller, just fulfilling the needs of a particular device. The Echo Dot kept on one end of my table is an example. It will get smaller as the days are yet to come.

When it becomes possible for a quantum computer to run at room temperature without overheating, the history of computing will take a leap again. Quantum computing, Artificial Intelligence and Brain Machine Interfaces are still shown as science-fiction today but the day is not far away when they become the reality.