Computing power - first notions and now

Today, I began to set up a new Mac Pro. (looks like the computer on the right) My new Pro has 6 gigabytes of memory and 2 Terabytes of hard disk space. It could build out much bigger. In the middle 1970s I began to work with computers - I had a simple terminal that allowed me to do email with a slow modem. (I think it may have been 50 baud or 50 characters per second). But it was truly amazing. We were in the middle of a very tough fight on a bill that would have given one institution the opportunity to help students and faculty using the usury laws. We had a determined opponent named Lou Papan who hated the institution, Stanford, and wanted to exercise his unique brand of power in the process. But the bill was complex. It was a great idea but hard to explain.

In the middle of the fight, we had a meeting with a couple of legislators and I needed to get back to the University Counsel and the VP public affairs about what I had learned and more importantly to show them the language that had been proposed which would allow us to negate Papan's opposition. I suppose we could have done all that via fax. But I was blown away by the ability to send all that information on something called Email. I was so amazed that for several years I kept the print out of the messages during that exchange - all printed on a primitive dot matrix printer (thumpety, thumpety, thump).

A few years later, I bought my first computer, an Osborne (the picture on the left). At about the same time I was on the Stanford campus and had a discussion with the director of the Stanford Computer Center. She told me that the total storage space in the network was 2 terabytes - the exact same size as the storage space on the Pro. All I can say is wow!