Believe me, I know what a "personal" computer was/is. I learned programming on a CDC-3600 that had 4K of magnetic core memory and a drum operating system. We communicated with it using punched cards and it occupied a space nearly as big as my family's house. The year you were born, James, I got a job working in an IBM mainframe shop so large that the computers took up one floor of a high rise building while the disc and tape drives occupied another floor and the power supplies took up yet a third floor.
Now I hold a Raspberry Pi in my hand and look at that tiny circuitry. I can really appreciate the progress. The newest RPi model is capable of emulating that giant mainframe and running faster than the original hardware did. Two Raspberry Pi computers with simh can form a VaxCluster too, and execute code faster than two VAX 780s did. Even though I've been here through half a century of "progress" it's sometimes hard to think about that and believe it. We live in the future, the future is now. --Gary
