Happy 8-8-8 Day!

Happy 8/8/8!!!

Twenty years ago today, I started my current job - on 8/8/88 - and here today we have another cool date - 8/8/8 (well technically of course, 8/8/08 - but I like 8/8/8 better)

I am told that the number 8 is considered to be very lucky in Asia, which is partially why the Olympics this year is starting on this date.

Twenty years is a long time - no matter how you slice it.  Twenty years ago, everyone thought the Star Wars franchise was done with an over  with.  Hmmm - maybe it should have been - considering how Episode 1 turned out...

Back in August 1988, I was using a cobbled together 80286 machine - that ran at either 10mhz or 20 - I forget which.  All I do know is I paid way too much for it.

Nowadays, you can get a cheap notebook for the amount of money I paid (in 1988 dollars) for just a motherboard - w/out any RAM!

Back in those days, hard drives were generally measured in 10s and possibly 100s of megs - if you were rich.

I still have a receipt someplace for the first hard drive I ever bought - a seagate 40meg drive that cost over $300.  Probably a lot over...

In those days, broadband was just for colleges and only hardcore geeks were able to use the internet.

In 1988 I was still using Compuserve or GEnie - probably at $5/hour - which is simply unheard of in this day and age.

The then new and proprietary bus toting IBM PS/2 introduced the world to VGA graphics for the first time - I still remember seeing a picture of a Parrot on my monitor and just could not believe the details and colors.

Of course, back then, most PCs were too wimpy to actually DO anything with those amounts of colors - and you had to contend with much lower resolutions and color depths.

8 bit computers were still not quite dead at this point, Radio Shack TRS-80s were still for sale, but the amount of support from 3rd parties were dwindling quickly - which is why I chose to jump ship from my TRS-80 Coco to the IBM Compatible world.

Technology can be amazing - my watch probably has more computing power than my PC did 20 years ago - and I can carry 4 gigs of storage on a small USB device that would have taken up probably entire table back then.   Welcome to the future!