A Time of Magic

It used to be that there were whole sections of computer science courses dedicated to very specialised input devices but such things have long since passed into the electronics courses. That’s the case with the input devices themselves too.

Thus if you want to get something slightly out of the ordinary it’s often the electronics retailers that stock it. You’d need to get a very large computer shop to find a barcode scanner these days I suspect. That’s more obviously (in an odd kind of way) an electronics produce but sometimes it can be very difficult to track down what would formerlly have been very much a computer component like a graphics pad. Well, you can get the little toy models but I found it quite an ordeal to track down a sensibly sized one a year ago.

So if you’re looking something that little bit out of the ordinary for your computer don’t neglect the electronics shops.

With the plummeting price of technology I’m sure that many computers are sitting under Christmas trees right now.

How many of us even think about backing up our information though? After all, the disc is sure to fail at some time and thus take with it a fairly large chunk of our lives in many cases. Would you really not mind losing all those photos stored on your computer?

The snag is though that backup is a hassle to do and difficult to keep as a habit over the longer term. However, online backup is now quite a viable option for those hooked up to high speed Internet. You still have to set it up and it will take an age to run the first time, but once that initial bulk work is done it’s very much an automatic thing that you can basically forget about until the day that you need it. You can even get it free for smaller amounts of data and these days “small” is actually quite a lot of information.

One of the most noticeable improvements in computer technology is in the area of portable storage media.

Those with long careers in the computer industry may recall the likes of the PDP8 of the late 1970s which sported a 2MB (yes two megabyte) hard disk some fourteen inches across and costing something like £10,000. These days even if you buy the cheapest flash drive you’ll be taking in terms of gigabytes and a price of under a tenner.

However, despite all that improvement in portability and capacity people are, if anything, less careful about safeguarding their information. One wonders just how many people have lost all their digital photos already simply because they didn’t bother to update the storage media?

Although you can obviously reuse the digital storage from, say, your camera it’s now so cheap that you may as well keep the original on the card after you copy it onto your computer and thus create a backup with no effort at all.