Building A Computer

It is hard to believe that it has only been about 30 years since the personal computer (PC) really started to become a household utility. When Tandy Radio Shack introduced their TRS 80 it became an over night success. With its 4KB of RAM and the Z80 processor that could run at a whopping 1.77 MHZ. The kit included the computer that was inside the keyboard, a very small black and white monitor, and a cassette player for loading your programs. The TRS 80 kit sold for about $600 and you had to wait in line to buy one. I waited two weeks to get my first computer toward the end of 1977. You would put a program cassette in the player, set it to load, go make a sandwich, and by the time you finished your sandwich, your program would be loaded and ready to use. WOW, they were great! Today a basic computer will have a clock speed of about 3 gigacycles (thats 1,000 million cycles per second) and a RAM (Random Access Memory) of 4 gigabytes (thats 4,000 million bytes). With the high speed computers of today, you can gain your information just about as fast as you can type in the request. Today every business, church, school, and home has at least one computer. The computer has replaced the mailman for much of todays mail. You can get your news, sports, dictionary, or find out about the new car you want to buy or about the tires for your old car. Children use computers to do their homework, moma uses the computer to do shopping or to help plan a meal and dad uses the computer to find that special fishing hole, a new job, or how to fix the plumbing. Todays computers are advancing faster than we can pay for them. And we find out about that new computer by doing research on our old computer. If you can think of it, you can research it on your computer.