Congratulations to Google on your 10th Birthday!

Kudos to Google for all their innovative contributions toward education and communication via the Internet.

The PC just turned 27 in August (1981), and I have worked with computers for 42 years. They were a lot bigger back then - and I never could have imagined that there could ever exist such overwhelming power in personal communication and education at the fingertips of non-technical people at the cost of a few hundred dollars.

Back in 1966, there were 29,000 IBM 1401 computers in existence, all leased from IBM for at least $8,000 per month and housed in special air conditioned rooms. A basic 1401 had 4K of memory; the maximum was 16K and they weren't 8-bit bytes, but 6-bit characters using an encoding called BCD (Binary Coded Decimal). Memory was not semiconductor based; it was magnetic and called core because each bit was a tiny magnetized donut.

1966 was also the year IBM introduced the System 360 - the beginning of something much bigger. IBM started with the Model 30 with 16-64K (yes K) of memory, but they were now bytes using EBCDIC (Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code) instead of BCD (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC). We were growing up.

I purchased my first personal computer in December 1988, almost 20 years ago. It was a 12 MegaHertz PC with one meg of RAM and a 42 Meg hard drive. It came with a 14" monochrome monitor, a keyboard and DOS. That computer cost $2,500.

We've come a long way since then. We have a powerful and miraculous tool with a multitude of uses, and Google has made it that much better!

We can only imagine what wonders await us. Happy 10th Birthday, Google!