Wednesday, April 22, 2009

#154 - Things our Grandchildren will not recognize

Nice title, no? I was having a conversation with a friend today and we talked about items that we are familiar with that people two generations hence (the imaginary grandkids) will have no clue about. Things like newspapers, phone booths, desktop computers, watches (kids use their cell phones for the time - more accurate), video cameras, photo & movie film, movie theaters, big box TVs, TV antennas to name a few.

We argued a while on when paper books would go extinct. Amazon has introduced their "Kindle" wireless reading device. KINDLE 2 Get books delivered in less than 60 seconds and no PC required! It remains to be seen if devices like this will replace their venerable past. I can see a time where you can have EVERY book you have read or used in school available on a reading device you carry around. Great concept!

Here are some technology dinosaurs: Hard Disk Drives (Solid State Technology Drives are now up to 80GB in size!); Floppy Disk Drives (people ask me all the time what to do with the boxes of old floppy disks they have lying around); CDs (just like vinyl records!); DVDs (Just like VCR tapes!); Answering Machines; Fax machines; Black & White Printers; paper photo albums; letters, snail mail and the one I'll miss the most: Local Stores!!!

Let me know what you think we will miss!

Monday, April 13, 2009

#153 - The LaserJets Birthday

The HP LaserJet is celebrating its 25th anniversary this month. Although I never owned an HP LaserJet (1), I did have a LaserJet II at work. The first laser printer for IBM Compatible personal computers was introduced in 1984 by HP as the LaserJet (now called LaserJet Classic). It had 300-dots per inch resolution and 8 pages per minute speed. It sold for a tidy $3,495.

The next LaserJet was not the II, but the LaserJet Plus. It introduced the concept of "soft fonts". You could now bold your print or italic the print. HP introduced the world's first mass market laser printer, the LaserJet series II, in March 1987, list priced at $2,695. There are still LaserJet IIs in operation. It was the most reliable printer ever produced. The first personal laserjet was the LaserJet IIp introduced in September 1989 and costing only $1495.

The LaserJet brought the end to the dot matrix and daisy wheel printers that started the PC revolution. You can now buy an HP LaserJet printer for only $129.00. It has 4 times the resolution and 3 times the speed of the original LaserJet. Life is good!