A good day...

I had a very good day on Tuesday. I went to a security vendor product launch up in London to see a new PKI key management server (I will write a separate bit about this in my next post) and as the venue was close I had the opportunity to meet a very good friend of mine for lunch so all in all a very good day.

Over lunch we got talking about the good old days when we worked together in Belgravia and how we managed to achieve so much with what little technology we had at the time. Looking back it is funny to think how we did especially when we reminisced about some of the implementations in the organisation and the now primitive features we relied on.

This got me thinking back even further to the spec of my first ever computer; it had 3K of working memory in total and used an audio tape player for storage. It was a Commodore Vic 20 and it was what made me embark on a career in computing, I have to thank my father for making the significant investment (which it was at the time) in the computer, I got bitten by the bug and have spent my entire working life in IT.
It is strange to think that I am typing this blog on my netbook whilst I sit on a train, I am online and I am taking all of this granted, it just works without me needing to worry. My netbook (let’s face it, by their very nature they are not the best spec) has 666,666.66667 times more working RAM than my first ever computer which is a massive leap in size, that is six hundred and sixty six thousand, six hundred and sixty six times more RAM, it is just mind boggling!

The first PC I worked on had a 20MB hard disk and it was cutting edge at the time, I would be amazed to see any computer OS run in less RAM than that nowadays. My little netbook has a 128GB solid state drive, 6400 times more storage that the first PC I worked on and the access times are significantly faster.

So where am I going with all of this? Well this shows how computers have evolved. It is common place now to have more RAM in a computer than you had as total storage in a computer just a few brief years ago and people now have storage in workstations measured in terabytes and for business network storage measured in petabytes.
As computers get ever more complicated, so do the threats and it is the challenge that we face to keep one step ahead in the IT security arms race that keeps my job interesting.

I find it hard to imagine what life would be like now without my computers however I also struggle to imagine what leaps and bounds that will be made that will be as significant as the last 20 years however I look forward to finding out.