Magid writes, “Sunday July 3, 1983, was an exciting day for me. I picked up a copy of the Los Angeles Times and there, in the business section, was my very first column about personal computers.
“I remember calling up a friend and telling him I had good news and bad news. The good news was that I just signed-up to write a column for one of America’s largest newspapers, but the bad news was that I had to write about computers rather than important stories like politics.
“Little did I know that technology would evolve into one of the most important stories of our times and that, in addition to getting to review hardware and software, a career as a tech journalist would eventually allow me to weigh-in on much broader issues such as privacy, personal safety and even political stories, including, of course, Russia’s interference with our 2016 election. The column was syndicated to papers around the world. I wrote for the LA Times until 2002 and have had three stints with the San Jose Mercury News, starting in the ’90s.
“In celebration of my 35th anniversary, I signed up for a subscription on Newspapers.com so I could download and re-read some of those early columns, which I have since posted at LarrysWorld.com. My first column, ‘Learn Buzzwords Before Shopping’ helped my novice readers understand basic terms like hardware, software, RAM and ROM. I also explained the meaning of bit, byte and kilobyte — the units of measurement that were important at the time. I did mention that a megabyte is a million bytes but there was no reason to explain gigabyte or terabyte. I’m not sure I even knew what those words meant at the time. I wonder if that’s now true about kilobytes for some of today’s readers. For you youngins, there are a million kilobytes in a gigabyte. Today’s smartwatches have millions of times the capacity of those early PCs.
Read more here.
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