From Punch Cards to Robots

I turned 50 this year. In a similar manner to my 30th and my 40th, I cannot remember my 50th. Supposedly I had a cracking good time. Here is a brief bio about me for my internet friends.

I fell in love with computers thanks to science fiction on television and in comics. "Judge Dredd and the Robot Rebellion" is the first comic I ever read (I so wish I had not thrown it away!) The intricacy of the British comic's fine black and white art made a mockery it's american counterparts. I fell in love with characters like "Walter the Robot" - Dredd's the comical sidekick and "Call Me Kenneth" - the original cyber nemesis, with his heavy metal warrior industrial robots squishing the helpless populace with the catch phrase "hello fleshy ones!". I read and reread the book Cyborg - the original story behind the TV Series 'Six Million Dollar Man', along with a hundred other inputs hopelessly aligning my young psych to a strangely optimistic world full of wondrous, dangerous machines.

In my teens, I could not afford a computer - but I could afford a computer MANUAL - so I saved my pocket money and purchased a System 80 computer manual and learned to program BASIC. My first 'hello world' was penned, not typed. My first computer experience was in Math class in college (high school) using punch cards to program a robot battle game on an Apple II. Machine code, on punch cards.

Lawn Mowing on the weekends for half a year bought me a Sinclair ZX81 with 1k of memory, which I spent hours typing in machine code gleaned from PC magazines for games . Soon it was Sinclair Spectrum with 16k, to 48k memory, better graphics and an actual (albeit disgustingly fleshy) keypad. Finally during my university days I bought an Amstrad CPC464 with 128k of RAM and integrated cassette deck. Tapes were horrible, and just the thought of them makes me cringe to this day.

Now I sit in front of a computer with terabytes of storage, 16Gbytes of RAM, with a CPU so fast that it does things almost before I ask it too. There are eight computing devices in my room as I write - three of them immediately within reach - all interconnected, listening, learning, reporting who knows what to who knows where - all for the purposes of ensuring I politely consume and within a limited hangout called 'liberty', comply. The 'they' have successfully cocooned me in a shell of technology within my personal space that is orders of magnitude more powerful than the entire global computing power at the time of my birth.

Fifty. Post hangover. Contemplating the bigger picture. I feel like I am on an Alvin Toffler inspired Willy Wonker elevator, and we have smashed through the glass ceiling of our chocolate palace. With increasing vertigo, and blissful panoramic view of my pending doom I am accelerating upwards and outwards. The acceleration of the change. I can sense the curvature of Moore's law now on the horizon.

Maybe you should join me on this great diaspora - lets free ourselves from the scarcity existence and struggle together in the stars. This gravity prison no longer feels like home, and I would hate for you to be left behind.

Now I stand on the event horizon of a technological singularity, the only one thing for certain. I will change.
I will not recognize myself in twenty years time, and neither will you. Let us hope we can still laugh, hold hands and somehow manage the time to roll around on the astro-turf of ecstasy .