Comments on: The Single Greatest Year in Tech History, Part One: The 1970s

By: Steve Gliksman

Steve Gliksman — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:22:05 +0000

moving fast forward through the high tech time machine I notice by September of 2001 computers, software, the Internet and technology in general were speeding up so fast that by the time you went to CircuitCity and bought a brandnew PC with all the fixings for about $4,500. you’d have the latest, greatest personal machine on the market, for about a week.

The sure enough a new one would be released making yours a little outdated, “Oh Rats”

But after 9/11 everything kind of SLOWED DOWN AND FROZE UP for a while. Yeah, you could get whistles and bells, but the actual hardware seemed to slow down, Software had problems and it cost more and more to fix the errors. Not just Windows but Macs had problems to.

After 9/11 technology went into the darkside for a while, maybe people were just too scared that the general population was getting too many powerful tools that UNLOCK SECURITY DOORS of all sorts and send mass viruses all over the place, or maybe too many lawyers got in the act and got new laws passed to protect certain property right ownerships of musicians, etc. But it slowed everything down for the consuer.

Anyone remember Napster? how about “KAZAA” I confess I downloaded a few songs from KAZAA via sharing it with others, but they went over board and made some deals so now you have to pay them big bucks for their songs, but why not use ITunes if your gonna go that route?

Think about it folks. A billion people from around the world with cellphones, YouTube accounts and the ability to exchange all those ideas in a moments notice.

You’d think that a group meeting with a billion people who put their thoughts together in a constructive manner just might be able to come up with some brilliant sollutions to some of the problems our generation is facing right now.

It may cost a few hundred million or more to get it all set up and connected, but we just might be at the verge of mutual self destruction and it’s when we’re at out worse that it brings out the best in people.

Let’s get crackin, you’d be suprised what a billion people can do IF we can organize the communications so it doesn’t get too much of an unorganized confused mess of people screaming at each other for war issues, economy issues, global warming issues etc.

just e-mail me if you have any suggestions but make it short and down to the point QUICKLY, REMEMBER i MAY HAVE TO SIFT THROUGH A BILLION MESSAGES SO DON’T TRY TO SPAM ME, just get to the point quickly steve@nttgold.com

By: Steve Gliksman

Steve Gliksman — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 06:44:36 +0000

The 70′s brought us Disco, and heavy metal music that helped loosen up Bill Gates and Steve Jobs so they could both move on to conquer the world with the Mac and PC.

Where would home computers be without the entertaining, gaming, music and creative artistic design aspect.

I say 1976 was the year that it all started coming together

By: BobS

BobS — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 18:22:33 +0000

Wow!! You skipped over core memory? 1st comp I worked on was the PDP-1 by Digital Equipment Corp., and had 16K of core memory… and it was randomly accessed… this was in 1961.

By: TomP

TomP — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:47:41 +0000

Find it hard to believe that there is no mention of the early Heath (later Heath/Zenith) machines that started coming out in the mid-70′s. Their first ones were the H-8 and the H-11 and were followed by a great machine the H-79 and then the H-100 which was a dual processor machine that would run HDOS (Heath Disk Operating System, an OEM MSDOS), CP/M (8-bit) and MP/M (16 bit.) They had a great idea, buy an H100 and run your present CP/M software on it then when you changed down the road to a DOS based system, you could use the same machine! Lack of marketing on the part of Heath/Zenith killed that line though.

By: xxloverxx

xxloverxx — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:22:08 +0000

Personally I think the year UNIX came about was the greatest year in technology, the years following that were only built upon UNIX itself. And when the Amiga came, that was a revolution. But really I don’t think it’s fair to say that there can be one favourite year, or even decade of computing history; every year new technology comes out and things will improve; in a decade or so we might all have new favourites. Past, present and hopefully future will be my favourite decades of technology. What we have now wouldn’t be around if our predecessors hadn’t thought of it, and our future depends on what we do now.

By: Bob Metcalfe

Bob Metcalfe — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:57:22 +0000

In 1973, Ethernet, TCP/IP, AND the cellphone were invented.

By: Bill Pytlovany

Bill Pytlovany — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 22:30:53 +0000

Impossible question. It’s like asking me what was my greatest year. My daughter Erica was born in 1975, and Amy was born in 1979. I think some other great things happen before or in between.

Bill

By: Brenda

Brenda — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:25:30 +0000

WHA??? No mention of WANG???