Week 2 - Musings...

Personal Computer Hardware: Wikipedia

An interesting and insightful look at the inner workings of computers. I work with library patrons (college students and faculty) everyday who have technology problems with laptops - I realized upon reading this how wantonly and arbitrarily they (ok, I'm guilty of this myself) tend to assign blame to certain computer parts when something goes wrong with no real basis for it. I frequently hear, "Oh, I think the hard drive is going bad" as the default excuse for why any number of problems occur. After reading this article entry, I've realized that not only is the hard drive more than likely not the issue a majority of the time, but that the motherboard probably is (yet I've rarely ever heard someone blame their motherboard as the cause of their problems). Computers have become so entrenched in our lives and in society, yet reading this causes you to realize how very little we tend to know about the true workings and make-up of these things that we use on a regular basis.

Moore's Law: Wikipedia

What jumped out most for me about this article is the correlation (albeit not substantiated by a traceable citation) of Moore's Law with obsolescence. In an age where the latest supposedly = the greatest and where there is a constant push to develop newer and faster computing resources, I anticipate that potential for our developed capacity to outpace our ability to utilize it. I see this as a problem more generally in information technology, where the exceptionally fast pace of development makes it very difficult for laypeople (let alone information professionals) to stay current and relevant. The potential is there, I think, for a new kind of digital divide to develop, where obsolescence pushes people out of the technology market who, despite their best efforts, simply can't stay current in the ever-increasing pace of technological development because of financial or technical considerations.

Computer Museum Website

Despite the fact that Moore's Law is said not to universally apply to all concepts in computing, a look through the Computer History Museum's website really gives one pause to take stock of how quickly and how far the course of computing has come since its inception. From the crudest of possible beginnings, the history of computing seems to follow along the lines of exponential growth and development. Since personal computing really took off in the 1980s to the present, it's possible to see how much development seems to be taking place. The Computer History Museum's website helps put much of this development into perspective while providing very helpful context to understanding the development of computing resources that we often take for granted today.