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Some great advancements are about to be made on computers. I am not talking about those huge mainframe computers that fill rooms, but I am talking about home computers. Those big mainframes will also be improved though. The home computer has come a long way in the last 20 years or so, when it began to become popular. Actually some computer inclined people had home computers way before that, including myself. I had done some work on main frame computers before there were any home computers available. As a matter of fact, we had to pass a computer course using a main frame in college. I remember when I ordered my first home computer. It cost 149 dollars and had a whopping memory of 1000 bites. It was a Sinclair ZX-81. This was not the first home computer and was not even the first Sinclair computer. The company was able to sell half of a million in the first year of production. I had ordered it from an advertisement in the back of Popular Mechanics, or Popular Science, I don't remember which. When it finally arrived I couldn't wait to get the box open and when I finally did, my heart almost stopped. I had pictured a rather large machine and this one was tiny with membrane keys and only weighed 12 ounces. It came with a clock program that you could type in, but only had enough memory and power to create a clock with one hand.

Things have sure changed from that time, but even then you could see the rapid advancement in home computers. While the Sinclair ZX-81 came out in 1981, a virtual powerhouse came out in August, 1982. It was the Commodore 64. Here was a machine that had a 64 Kilobyte memory and color. That is 65,536 bytes and was selling for the unbelievable low price of $595. What made it so amazing was the fact that big corporations were being run on huge mainframes that had only the same amount of memory. We now had a computer that was generations ahead of the Sinclair that came out only about a year after it. Computers continued to improve at an unbelievable pace, until we got to where we are today. The thing that many people feel have held them back is the operating system of Microsoft Windows. What would we have today if there had been competition in operating systems? One can only imagine.

Most of us have a machine with either Intel chips or AMD chips, that is being run mostly on a Microsoft Windows system and a few have one that is being run on an Apple operating system. The hardware has pretty much become the same on both systems. Both operating systems have their problems, but those that use the Apple operating system swear by it. The same can not be said for many Windows users, including me. The only reason I use it is because the that is where most of the software is. There is much more software out for Windows than Apple. I am still using Windows XP because I refuse to take on Vista or even Windows 7 when it is available, because much of my hardware and software would not work with it and Vista is slower than Windows XP. That is not my idea of an improvement.

Memory is one area that we are going to see huge improvements in, in the next few years. Scientists have discovered how to use a sort of three dimensional storage system that will make so much memory available that we will be able to keep the entire Library of Congress on our computers, if that is what we wanted to do. Look for hard drives to go the way of the black and white television. The reason for this will be that the type of memory that we will be using will retain what we put on it, even if the computer is turned off. Recently there has been talk of using a solid state hard drive which is nothing more that a fancy memory card that can retain data without electric current. This is a sort of stop gap measure until the entire memory system of the computer is made this way. Can you imagine having a system with thousands and thousands of terabytes? A terabyte is roughly one thousand gigabytes. The actual figure is 1,000 gigabytes equals 0.976562 terabytes. The Library of Congress has collected about 82.6 terabytes of data as of the end of 2008.

Computers run on central processing units. Right now we are up to four of them on a chip. It is like having four individual processing units or four computers running in sync. This will be changing soon and we will see the advent of 8, 16, 32 and 64 cores on a chip turning our home computers into an unimagined powerhouses. There is talk of being able to show television programs on our monitors in 3D without glasses. That would really be cool and could add some interesting effects to programs that we use. Some people are saying that we already have enough power on our computers for home use and I agree with them to a point. I have to say that we have enough power for what we do now, but this may not be enough for the things that we will want to do in the future that haven't been invented yet, or are in the experimental stage right now. Remember those games where you used to put on a helmet and you would be immersed into the game? Think of the same experience without the helmet that can be used for everyday computing. Computing may become quite a different experience than it is today.

Another technology that has been spoken about for years and we could handle right now is 64 bit computing. Most of us are using what is known as 32 bit computing right now. Theoretically, 64 bit computing would double the speed of what we do using the same chips. This could be increased to 128 bit, 256 bit, 512 bit and so on. The dream of people since computers first hit the scene was voice control. While we have some of that available using special software, thought control is also being used. Many paralyzed people are now hooked up to computers and control them through electrodes that allow them to completely control their computers. Look for this system to be improved some day to the point that this is how we will control our home computers and do it without wires.

I don't want to get too far into the future with this article, so I am not going to get into things that are more than a few years down the road, such as nano computers, biological computers, Quantum computers and such. Actually the near future is exciting enough for most of us. Look for some computers to get very small, so small that what is a PDA today, Personal Digital Assistant, will be a full blown computer tomorrow. Already PDAs and telephones that are also PDAs are showing signs of this and some are even running a cut down version of the Windows Operating System. One idea which is being talked about a lot, is making computers more like humans, by having them respond to you. An example of this would be a computer voice that would ask questions when needed instead of putting up those boxes that you click. I don't know how far away this would be?

All in all there are an awful lot of improvements coming in the field of computing and it just might turn out that people that used computers like the Sinclair, might not even recognize a computer twenty years from now.