O Brave New World!

The Atlantic's on-line archive of articles includes one from 1982, James Fallows's "Living with a Computer." It includes this trip down memory lane:

When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen. . . . It is faster to type this way than with a normal typewriter, because you don't need to stop at the end of the line for a carriage return (the computer automatically "wraps" the words onto the next line when you reach the right-hand margin), and you never come to the end of the page, because the material on the screen keeps sliding up to make room for each new line. . .

My computer has a 48K memory. Since each K represents 1,024 bytes of information — each byte representing one character or digit — the machine can manipulate more than 49,000 items of information at a time. In practice, after allowing for the space that The Electric Pencil's programming instructions occupy in the computer's memory, the machine can handle documents 6,500 to 7,500 words long.

Very exciting. I look forward to upgrading my computer to 48K of RAM. But it's not just RAM: we've also got hundreds of kilobites of external storage:

When I've finished with such a chunk, I press another series of buttons and store what I have written on my disk drive. This is a cigar-box-shaped unit that sits next to my computer, connected through a shocking-pink ribbon cable containing thirty-four separate strands. Inside the drive is the floppy disk, which is essentially magnetic recording tape pressed into the shape of a small record and then enclosed in a square cardboard envelope, 5 1/4 inches on each side. . . . Each of the disks in my system can hold about 100K of information, or more than twice as much as a full load from the computer memory. If one disk is full, I pull it out and snap another in.

It dawns on me that my students have probably never touched a 5.25-inch diskette, have never measured the memory of anything in kilobytes, and have never handled tractor-feed paper. Damn punk kids — I've got socks older than they are.