High Technology

Moore's Law holds that the amount of memory one can shove onto an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years.  This means the power of a typical personal computer also increases exponentially.  The gee-whiz technology of two years ago is already obsolete; it is no longer unsafe to send the secrets of a 2005 computer to the Chinese; after all, they may be selling those secrets back to us...

In 1975, there were no personal computers.  There were barely even hand-held calculators, and those that existed cost hundreds of dollars.  It was not uncommon to find locking seatbelts in some labs, designed to keep calculators from walking off.  Then Texas Instruments offered the first SR-50 for sale at the unheard-of price of less than 100 dollars, and suddenly there was nothing to stop progress.  In less than a decade, calculators could be had for under ten dollars, and they came with all sorts of great functions - sines, factorial, exponents and roots.  Heck, the things were even programmable.

Personal computers changed the universe as we know it even further.  There was no World Wide Web in 1980, but the ability to run word processing, prepare mathematical spreadsheets and write sophisticated programming on a box that fit on top of a desk was a revelation, for which we can thank Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and those first Apple computers.  But it wasn't until the '90s that you could run a spreadsheet without a math co-processor, and until the Pentium chips became commonplace, applications like Lotus 1-2-3 (think early-generation Excel) still had an option to turn off the automatic recalculation of numerical equations.  Windows back then actually consisted of "windows", delineated boxes on the home page of the operating system that each had a different feature or opened a different program.  Still, the pace of improvements in computing power and capabilities has been stunning.  In 1982, bubbles memories were a big deal because even if your device were accidentally turned off, it "remembered" what you were working on...

Advancements in technology are nice, but I still have and quite actively use a solar-powered Texas Instruments calculator that I bought in 1990.  It has twelve significant digits and every function I've ever needed to use, and it operates in low light - which is handy because I'm often kept in the dark by my superiors...