I was born in 1985 and my earliest memory of a computer is the desktop PC that my dad brought home one day.

As I recall, it was monumentally expensive, and it ran DOS, which stands for disk operating system,

one of several computer operating systems that was popular before the age of the

GUI, or graphical user interface, which is something that today we don't really think about.

An operating system is a colorful and interactive and clickable thing, but back then, the

graphical user interface was fairly revelatory. DOS was just a black screen

with some text on it, and you navigated the files on your computer by looking at text and typing text.

You booted software by writing a line of code that told the computer to do so.

There was none of this fancy touchscreen business, and there wasn't even any of that fancy

mouse-clicking business at this time.

Apple's famous 1984-esque commercial, where a revolutionary hurls her hammer at a Big Brother-like figure on a massive

TV screen, was eluding in some ways to breaking down the barrier between the common man

and access to computers. Rather than needing to essentially learn the simple coding language

required to access files using DOS, Apple's new Mac 128K

personal computer had a graphical user interface. That 128K stood for the 128 kilobytes of RAM

that the computer had, by the way. For comparison, 128 kilobytes is 0.000128

gigabytes. I have 8 gigabytes of RAM in the laptop that I'm using right now, though many machines

have way more than that these days.

So my modern Mac laptop is about 62,500% more powerful, at least in terms of RAM, of memory,

than that original Mac desktop. But if you go back further than the mid-80s, you'll quickly

find that although there have long

been personal computers, computers that are contained within an individual unit, that one person

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