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When I was in elementary school, back in the early 1960's, I can remember getting my Weekly Reader Magazine and reading about this huge "machine" that filled up an entire basement and actually performed computations at an amazing rate. I remember the article emphasizing the size of the device and the amount of heat generated by all of the tubes that it contained. But man, what a smart "machine". They called it, a computer.

Cool...

Life went on and I continued to watch black and white television and make phone calls with a rotary dial phone on an analog phone system. I played baseball and football and enjoyed backyard BBQs with my family. We had monthly neighborhood parties and we had a wonderful time.

We had video games, too. Well, we had "What's My Line" and a few other game shows on television. Technically, I guess those are video games.

Okay, I'm really stretching it here.

Then we began to hear more and more about such devices. There were punch card machines and punch card readers and they could perform some tasks so much faster than a person could. These were big, bulky, expensive machines.

Cool...

And so I'm in High School now and we are landing a man on the moon and the Lunar Excursion Module and the Command Module all have these wonderful computers on them. You know, electronic devices that perform mathematical calculations so much faster than the human brain can and without which we couldn't possibly have a space program. Even though during the Lunar landings technicians still backed up the computers with their trusty slide rules.

I got a Heath Kit catalog and they advertised a mechanical computer that you could purchase for just $12.95; so I did. And this plastic kit arrived and I had to put it together and it had levers and such and you had to know Binary Numbers to make it work. I tried to use it once and it broke.

Not cool...

But then this company called IBM had these machines available for businesses and it was all the rage and anybody that was anybody was learning how to use them. Yeah, they were still big and expensive, but man, they were COMPUTERS.

Cool....

Next thing I knew we had hand held calculators and people were talking about having computers in their homes and my head was spinning...

Didn't take long to learn that the calculators we were using were as sophisticated as the computers that had been on board the L.E.M.

So let's see, imagine a world without computers. I didn't have to growing up; I lived in a world without computers. And it wasn't so

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