the march of technology

Saturday, April 22, 2000, at 09:49AM

By Eric Richardson

There as times when it just amazes me how far technology has come so fast, and how much my world has changed in the last few years.

I swear it was only 1994 that I would get up early in the moring to dial up to Sumter, SC, area BBS's looking for shareware and playing the cool little BBS games. I was using a 386 notebook with a monochrome display. At that time my main computing platform was a Commodore 128 (with a roaring 2mhz processor, dual 720k floppies, and a 24-pin dot matrix printer). That machine basically tri-booted three OS's. There was the Commodore 128 mode, the Commodore 64 emulation, and C/PM (good for one thing... the adventure game).

Fast forward to 2000. I'm sitting here typing on a PII/400 with 256mb ram, 40gig of hard drive space, and a 17 inch monitor. Occasionally I have to roll a couple feet over to the SGI O2 (200MHZ R5K, 128MB RAM, 40gig of hd, 20" monitor). On the way I roll past my VAIO notebook, a far cry from the monochrome ancestor (PIII/500, 192mb ram, 12gig hd, 15" screen).

In 1994 I connected to BBS's with a 2400baud modem. Now I'm sitting here at Gospelom with 100baseT ethernet running to a T3 and two T1s.

Only one thing has remained constant...

You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick building. Around you is a forest. A small stream flows out of the building and down a gully.