The world of computing and computers has come a very long way in a very short space of time. Less than forty years ago computers were huge machines that would fill entire rooms. Mainframes is what they were called. Giant lumbering machines that, to be honest, could probably do less than the average cell phone is able to do today. Processing power has come a long way. But there have even been a huge number of changes in the last five years and unless you are at the cutting edge of computer design and technology, you might be amazed at some of the advances that have taken place. In short, the old-school personal computer that you might have used and known five years ago, is potentially a very different beast now. Here are a few insights to keep you up to date with the advancing technology.
Qwerty is a changing beast
The old school qwerty keyboard is still around, at least in terms of the order of the letters and the functionality of the keys. But these days computers are not just used for writing letters and answering emails, the world of e-sports is very much upon us and so the tools of the trade have been modified to meet the requirements of an ever-advancing industry. A quick online search for something like ‘gaming keyboard Australia’ will highlight exactly what we are talking about. All fancy shapes with lights and additional functionality that were never required before, the keyboard has changed massively in the last few years.
Everything is wireless
Remember when everything was connected with wires? The back of your desktop was a nest of cables hooking your PC up to the monitor, the printer, the mouse and probably even the scanner. It was a fulltime job looking after all the connections. That of course has changed massively, in many ways prompted by the arrival in a big way of the laptop. Now everything is connected wirelessly, with items like printers and the mouse not needing any wires to link them to the computer and to help them function.
Storage solutions
We don’t feel the need to mention discs of any variety. Floppy, stiffy or compact they are all horribly redundant and even unrecognizable to the new generation of computer users. But so too are hard drives and flash drives. Nobody really makes use of these technologies anymore – probably because they were always getting lost or corrupted or stolen. Instead everything is now stored in the cloud, either on private servers, via Google or Amazon products or on services like DropBox. In fact, such is the ease of saving things that these days many people just use social media solutions like Instagram or FaceBook to store their photographs and memories. The other option for storage is of course the personal computer itself. Where back in the day memory was limited and it tended to be kept for important programs and files, now computers come with the capacity for so much memory that it is easy to store almost anything on your machine.
