What a week... IBM turns 100 years old, the desktop PC is just 30 years old as Apple predicts it's demise, and I... well... turn more than 30.  I have to own that because I've been fascinated by computers for longer than PC's have been around.  Today I read stories about technology on my phone, dig a little deeper from my easy chair on my tablet, and if I'm so inspired make my way to my laptop to type a few notes and thoughts back into the cloud.

As an architect and inhabitant of the cloud,  I'm nostalgic for the days when you could actually see computing happen.  There was a day when input came from cards and output came in the form of blinking lights.  Now calculations happen in my wristwatch on transistors unimaginably small to track the tic of one second and supercomputers compete at 32.4 petaFLOPS.  The 1964 EBCDIC Character set, shown on the card at right, was born the same year as me.  Time sure does fly.