Friday I turned 41. I don't feel or look 41, so I will deny it for awhile. (I'm allowed.) But, as we do when we reach these milestones, we reflect. Another milestone occurred this weekend. It is the 30th anniversary of the Homebrew Computer Club. This was the group of geeks that brought about the evolution and revolution of computing as we know it. This is where Steven Jobs met Steve Wozniak. We should stop and pay respect to this group of people.

Let's reflect. When I was a kid the arcades were filled with pinball machines, and I was a pinball wizard. Many of these great machines were made by companies we've come to associate with video games (Midway and Atari come to mind). Television didn't have remote controls yet. And calculators? Many were still using slide rules. My father, being a gadget nut to rival James Bond, and my grandfather, a scientist, were both tech geeks. I remember when my father brought home a little invention that would replace his slide rule: a calculator. It was a Texas Instruments. Mind you, this was the early 70's. It cost him, at that time, $300. That's about the equivalent of $1,000 now. A few years later my home was host to a new invention: the VCR, made by (drumroll please) Sony. It was the Betamax, and it had a cute little remote conrol on a cord. That behemoth was over $1,000. My friends and their parents would stop by so my father could proudly show off this new piece of home technology. The first thing he recorded on it was a movie (Woody Allen's "Sleeper") taped from another new thing: cable television and HBO. When HBO launched, they showed only two movies a night, with a total of about twelve titles a month.
And the revolution had started. While these new technologies were coming into the home, the Homebrew guys were busy in their garages in Silicon Valley laying the foundation for the first PCs. At home my new toys were made by Atari and Coleco (I was a pong champ!), and at the arcades new machines came in, effectively killing my allowance. I ruled at Asteroids, Galaxian, and Tempest. Then, at home, was the first PC: A TRS-80. Made by the Tandy Corporation and sold through Radio Shack, it took BASIC programming, and their went my afternoons after school. My best friend and I spent hours pushing the limits of that machine. Not long after I had a Commodore 64, complete with magnetic tape storage. Then came that marvelous piece of PC perfection: The Apple! Homebrew's Jobs and Wozniak and had done it!

Respect. A moment of silence is now in order.

A couple of years later, on the Apple IIc, I played my first PC game: Wizardry, a D&D-style rpg. Along with that came my coffee addiction.

In the office place, computers were HUGE (physically) devices that were little more than word processors, and some of the better ones built data bases. (By the way, prior to this, most data storage was done via keypunch where data was enterred and stored on cardboard cards with hundreds of holes representing bits of information punched into them.) Floppy were "floppy" and 10 inches across. Then 7 inches, then 5 inches... And in Silicon Valley, transistors (that had just replaced vacuum tubes) were giving way to micro-processors and silicon chips. Computing speeds were increasing exponentially along side RAM size. Tron was in the movie theaters, and CD and laser discs came into being. (The first laser disc game: Dragon's Lair!) Macs spun off of Apple, and IBMs started making it into the homes.

And on the heels of all this progress, something called the world-wide web came into being, and surfing had a new meaning. Nintendo became the new toy, and an OS called Windows started making waves.

Again, let's pay respect.

Now, here I sit at my PC that does things faster than I EVER would have thought possible 20 years ago, with the world at my fingers. Earlier I did my banking and bill-paying (and some shopping) right here. Now, I'm about to get online with a game and join hundreds of others on a virtual playing field with graphics approaching a realism that I only dreamt about as a teenager with my TRS-80 and Atari. (And then, it was still science-fiction.) Oh, and of course I'll be TiVo-ing my shows so I don't miss them.

None of this would have been if it wasn't for the work of some geeks in California. Thanks guys! And, cheers!

Respect.

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