While I was reading “The Coming of the Microcomputer”, I thought of the change computers have gone through over the years. Back in the 1950’s computer were gigantic. They took up tons of space that could fill an entire room. All these computers can do is simple math equations similar to what our calculators do nowadays. Information must also be transferred manually unlike modern technology.

Today the technology evolved to something more smaller and more compact. Which are our smartphones, a product of modern technology which to the eyes of those living decades ago seems like a dream. I currently own the iPhone 6s Plus which came out a few years ago so it has less power than the latest iPhone, but it is significantly more powerful than the room-sized computers of the 1950’s. In terms of tech, we have developed so much in half a century.

Our phones now are not just pocket computers but also cameras, mobile phones, and provides different ways to communicate.

For this week’s blog post, I chose to write about Mark Nunes’ “Email, Post, Letters”. I enjoyed reading this chapter because Nunes focuses on many things that attribute to the technological side of mail and what that entails. When we send an email, we don’t think of much when we type it, when we send it, and when we recieve a response. There was so much that went into the construction of faster mail delivery, that it became what we know as all sorts of different forms of mail. Letters, post, delivery, mail they are all such awesome and complicated services that have been     progressing for our “well-being”. The amount of number associated with daily deliveries is mind boggling. The amount our world had progressed from snail mail or no mail at all, depending on your geographical location, we have come so far. These words highlighted for me, how far our world, and our societies have come, what progress we have made in all ways. Technological, biological, and even  subcategories of just those areas of lie or so rich and filled what information, data, and onward and upward movement. That concept is awesome to think about, to know that if we apply mail and delivery progression, imagine so much more how much the world progressed in other departments, e.g. the Indsutrial Era, to name one.

For this week’s blog post, I decided to respond to Ted Nelson “Literary Machines Part 1” which I found to be very interesting because he invented the word “hypertext” which is something I frequently used all the time. Nelson states “some people like all this incompatibility and complication, and say it is the new world we must learn to live in. Others, already hating computers, correctly dread these matters and hope vainly to stop the computer tide.” (Nelson, 14) When I read this quote it made me think about how people hate iPhones and you have others that hate Androids. Both devices do the same thing. Preferably, you have people that buy the newest iPhones or newest Androids. For some reason, we feel like it’s necessary to buy because we can feel like were being left out on the newest device. For example, I recently brought a new iPhone because of the newest features. Computers and technology shape our lives. The truth is we all rely on technology a great deal to get through the day. Whether it’s at work, at home, or at school we depend on computers and technology greatly. However, it may be not a good thing because life would be different without technology in our lives.

Work Citied
Ted Nelson, Literary Machines Part 1

This week I decided to reflect on Brian Winston’s “The Coming of the Microcomputer”. While reading this I couldn’t help but think about how far we’ve come with technology and how much it has expanded through time. These “minicomputers” have taken over the globe. Before while people were continuously trying to make these computers smaller, faster, and better, they were just going off of how quickly the invention was made; but now we carry these quickly developed and tiny computers everywhere we go. On the very first page of this text, Winston quotes Augarten saying “For the first two decades of the existence of the high speed computer machines were so scarce and so expensive that man approached the computer the way an ancient Greek approached an oracle”. (p. 12) I found this quote so interesting because I feel like this is exactly how we act when a brand new iPhone or Samsung Galaxy is coming out. As if it were a god put on this earth. It’s such a precious and expensive object that we want it right away and we just have to have it. The only difference is that we jump on these brand new products while before they didn’t. However we treat these objects with such care that the smallest thing may happen to it and we go absolutely bonkers- mostly because if we drop it and it breaks we die a bit on these inside because we know just how expensive these phones are. Computers have been developing in itself for so long and now we have things like iPads, laptops, tablets, Smartphones that we can’t seem to live without now, etc. Technology by the day is growing more and more and we can’t seem to get enough of it. The world has become so digitalized that we even forget how to do things without it. Myself included.