I upgraded my laptop to 1Gb of RAM. This caused a moment of pause.

When I first joined IBM in 1990 the company was still in the thrall of PROFS and VM/CMS and mainframes in general. Allowing staff to use PCs was just not even given much thought. I was privileged to have a genuine PC-XT on my desk as a co-op instead of the standard-issue 3279 terminal.

When I returned as an Associate Information Developer in 1991, I was given a PS/2 Model 80 with two 60Mb drives. It ran OS/2 1.3. I don't remember how much memory (RAM) it had, maybe, maybe 16Mb.

One of the guys I was working with took me on a virtual tour of the development mainframe we used. It had 512Mb of main memory and (hey, I'm forgetting the terminology finally) another 512Mb of "secondary" memory (which was slower and used for hiperspace, paging, swapping ,etc.

That system had perhaps 1000 people using it. All via 3270 terminals or APPC.

Now, my laptop, which pretty much by definition is a single-user machine, has 40Gb of disk and 1Gb of memory. In the house we have close to 1Tb of disk, though some of it is locked up in various dedicated boxes like the Tivoim.

While having that much power/capacity/whatever is cool and all, and makes it much easier to use Microsoft Office applications (especially Visio!), I'm not sure that it's such a wonderful thing. I can't really do that much more than I did in 1990. My writing is still limited by how fast I can type (and that rate is slower on today's lousy keyboards… give me a genuine manufactured-by-IBM-Lexington PC-AT keyboard anyday). I can do some graphic things I couldn't do before. I can multitask, but I was doing that even in 1990 on the 3270 terminals, moreso once I conquered APPC configuration and Communications Manager. I think I get a bit too hung up on how things look now. I can't just power-write, windows pop up and demand attention, the cursor suddenly switches to a spinning globe or clock, mystery applications steal focus just long enough for whatever I'm typing to be redirected elsewhere.

So, while the geek in me is quite happy to have a 1Gb laptop (and nearly 1Gb in this mac, and the Gb's of disk space), the writer, programmer, and whatever else I am in me isn't so sure that I've advanced that far. It makes things I do and have been doing easier, but doesn't really add that much to my day. It doesn't make it possible for me to entirely cease doing something. I still have to type the characters into the computer, I still have to think through the design of a program or the plan of the operations center. I can't just say to the air I want something that does this, this, that, and a bit of this.

Back in August I posted a Lazyweb request for ideas about a smart diagramming tool. I still need to sift through the great suggestions I got, but I think that that request originated with this sense I have of: I have all of these great tools, but none of them really help me do anything new.