The Commodore 64 - 1984

Jack Tramiel was a typewriter repairman in the 1950’s.  He went to Toronto when he received a contract to build typewriters.  He moved to Canada and decided to create his own business and sell typewriters.  He saw the success of desktop “adding machines” and decided to make these.  This venture was quite successful and he “officially formed his new company in 1962 called “Commodore Business Machines, Canada.”  The sales started to decline, so Jack went to Japan to see the nifty little electronic calculator.  He returned with these new devices and business soared.  Since other companies were producing these faster and cheaper (TI), the technicians decided to build desktop computers.  The PET was born in 1977.
 The Commodore PET was released about the same time as Apple, so it was never a huge success.  But the Commodore VIC-20 was born in 1981, with a keyboard and Motherboard and 5k of memory.  It was cheap ($300), mass produced and they could program their own software.  With high sales, it was limited in power.  So the Commodore 64 came out in 1984.
 The Commodore was upgraded in 1983 and 1984 with 128k of memory.                      http://www.inxpress.net/~redcat23/c64                                       .

 

The Super Computer - 1999
Super computers are hallowed because of the speed in which they solve complex problems, such as modeling weather, sophisticated cosmological predictions, and, most demanding of all, computations of tax breaks for business.  Super computers are able to deal with complex problems through parallel-processing techniques, in other words, running more than one computation at a time.  An IBM SP is capable of performing approximately 76 gigaflops.  That is one of those new technical terms describing doing about 76 billion arithmetic operations per second without loosing the decimal point.  The expense of such computers is such that they are primarily used to research themselves.
Now comes (legal term—I am multi-talented) Cornell University, working with Dell, Intel, Microsoft, and Giganet and builds a super computer with 10 hours of setup time for about 20 to 25% the cost of today’s models.  If that is not enough, they used off the shelf equipment available to most small businesses.  The Advanced Cluster Computing Consortium (AC3) took 64 Dell Poweredge 6350 servers with four Pentium III processors, each running Windows NT; mounted them in eight racks of eight servers; and linked them with a 100-megabyte cLAN Cluster Switch.   Employing the Cornell written Cluster ConNTroller software, the system was driven off on its shake down cruise, so far, an apparent success.
The implications here for the future of computing resources are incomprehensible.  Currently conceived prospects for the systems are business, higher education, and government agencies interested in the effective planning, implementation, and performance of commodity-based systems, software, and tools.
Links:      http://www.tc.cornell.edu

Classroom of the Future  -  2077 (Education takes a long time to change)
A determination of the DNA Intelligence Potential is conducted before birth.  A learning program will be developed for each individual before they start their formal schooling.  The student will enter his individual learning cell.  Programs will be turned to each student's abilities and methods of learning.  The "teacher" will maintain teaching computers and insure that all systems are functioning efficiently.  Student's work will be evaluated continuously, and adjustments are made to reteach or accelerate the learning.  Studies demonstrate that students need the classroom setting as a means to acquire socialization skills.  However, there are no discipline problems at all, for students not producing or acting out will get a little extra "charge" from the electronic interface. :)