IT marches on

Every time I upgrade one of my computers, I give the swap-out to a family member.  My mom has been the recipient twice.  She currently has a Dell desktop with all the peripherals that is more than powerful enough for her needs.  She likes to play Solitaire and the other games that came with the installation; she also listens to CDs and looks at photos on occasion.  The oddest and coolest thing is that she has no desire to use the Internet.  Mom is well-educated, well-read, and quite alert.  She is well aware of the Internet phenomenon, and some of her friends use the 'Net regularly.  But Mom gets along quite nicely without it, thank you very much.

My dad (RIP) and I were the only two in the family who were really bitten by the PC bug.  When Dad passed in 1985, my brother Owen and I cleared his apartment of his belongings.  One of his possessions was a Radio Shack TRS-80, one of the first computers made available to the mass market.  At the time, I was fascinated by it but couldn't figure out what to do with it.  I used it to write a program that picked Lotto numbers at random and quickly lost interest.  I have no idea what I did with the TRS-80; my guess is that I moved away from it at some point.  I don't think that it would command that much on the open market today, as they were quite popular in the early '80s.  But it would look really sweet hooked up to my Dell XPS410.

As for me -- I made an excellent living managing an IT department for over a decade. The career path was engaging to say the least, and I eagerly anticipate returning to the IT industry in 2012 after a long hiatus (early retirement followed by kidney failure). I enjoyed struggling with the challenges presented by IT in the workplace on a daily basis, doing my best to keep up with emergent technologies (an impossible task, but the fun is in the journey), and helping to develop and advance the careers of my co-workers. As time passed, it became evident to me that future advances in computing would center around the delivery method as opposed to the data processing function; when I look at the proliferation of smartphones, tablets, the Internet, and cloud computing, I can only think that this trend will continue, and that the best is yet to come!