Déjà vu

My first computer was a Commodore VIC20, with colour and sound! You could just plug it into your TV. It had almost 4K of free memory. You could play the most fantastic games, using a joystick. What a prodigy of technology. "A keyboard, screen and joystick. What could a future computer need more? It was impossible for me to envision. To me the computer was complete, finished.

A few years later I learned S360 mainframe assembler. It was the only program language that facilitated a world wide response time (.../responsetime) of three seconds. The 4K boundary returned, as maximum size for a program segment. It was spacious for someone who was used to 3.5K in Basic.

The mainframe text processor was the IBM Document Composition Facility (.../DCF370HOME). Documents were platform independent because of various cryptical codes. A few years later the Apple Mac hit the market. Everything was graphical, even the text processor. I could forget the cryptical codes. Great, what a prodigy of technology.

In the nineties I worked on all sorts of Object Oriented PC systems. Today's PC's are fast as lightning and have plenty of memory. A one-second-response time is no problem for most functions. O miracle, what a prodigy of technology.

Internet sets us back in time:

• It would be great to have a response time of just a few seconds. So better keep your web pages below the 4K boundary.
• HTML is the little sister of the old mainframe text processor.
• Web-TV brings Internet on TV. The VIC20 was far ahead of its time.

Till next week.
Nut