In honor of our ten years in business and successfully taking care of all of your computer problems in Carson, Reno and Minden. We thought it would be fun to take a look at how far computers have come since the year 2000!
The biggest news at the dawn of the new millennium was probably the Y2K bug! Programmers were worried that computers would not recognize the two digit date stamp of 00 (short for 2000). After several millions of dollars being spent on upgrading business and government computers, January 01, 2000 seemed to come and go without a problem in the computing world. The other big headliner for the year 2000 was the ILOVEYOU or LOVELETTER virus which ended up being one of the most costly viruses to clean up at that time to the tune of $1 billion. The virus was created by two Filipino students and spread through an e-mail attachment, which, once opened, would propagate and send itself out to all addresses saved in contacts, as well as embed itself in system directories. And with that a new era of computer troubles started, the era of viruses, worms and Trojans!
In 2000, the average desktop computer had a 10GB hard drive, 64 MB memory, a floppy drive, and dial up modem, all nicely enclosed in a white case. Average price was roughly $1,200 -$1,800, if you added in a 17” CRT monitor you brought the price closer to $2,000. Files were saved on to floppy disks or the short lived Iomega Zip disks, which were rather expensive and known for failing and causing the user to lose all data saved on them. Most popular operating systems were Windows 95 and Windows 98, although Microsoft released Windows 2000 in February of that year, with Windows ME quickly released in June. Office 97 was still the most popular software for business operations, Internet Explorer 5 was the most commonly used browser. Internet Service Providers were typically private companies such as AOL and Earthlink, which was delivered over the phone lines via a dial up modem which would boast a whopping 56K download speed. Laptops were about 2.5” thick and weighed over 7lbs, and had an average of a 6GB hard drive and a two hour battery life, all this to the tune of about $2,500! CDRW drives were still pretty rare, and DVD-RW almost unheard of! iTunes had not yet been released by Apple, and digital music players were just gaining popularity. At the time Hewlett Packard held about 47% of the market share, making HP the machines techs repaired the most.
Fast forward 10 years, and we literally mean fast! Today it is all about speed, from internet speed with a decent DSL connection measuring at 6.0Mbs (if you do the math it translates close to 6000K, or 107 times faster than the dial up modems), to fancy graphics cards built for today’s fast paced games, to 4GB of RAM! The world of computers today in 2010 is almost unrecognizable in comparison to that of 10 years ago, average hard drive size now for a desktop is roughly 500GB and for a laptop about 250GB to accommodate all of our photos, music and movies, which of course you will be viewing on your flat screen LCD monitor! Although storage devices are getting physically smaller their storage capacity is getting bigger and like we have already said faster. We here at DeBug Computer are honored to have you as a client and choosing us for all of your computer needs over the last ten years, and we look forward to serving you for the next ten!