I bought my first computer 22 years ago today, on May 11, 1983. Changed my life.

It was an Apple IIe, a minor 1983 update to the classic Apple II that had been introduced in 1977. The pace of technological change has accelerated since then.

The central processing unit (CPU) in my Apple IIe was a 6502 chip running at 1 MHz, just like the original Apple II. When I tried my hand at typing in programs in the built-in BASIC language, I was astonished at the speed of the machine. Error messages might flash by too quickly for me to see. My daisy-wheel printer could hammer out about 12 characters per second — very impressive compared to my own halting manual typing.

The computer I’m using right now has two CPUs, each running at 2GHz — 2,000 times the clock speed of my first computer. The CPUs are of a different design: they can deal with data in bigger chunks than the 6502; they use a RISC instruction set that operates significantly differently from the 6502. My new computer might be many thousands of times faster than my Apple IIe, or it might be only about 1,000 times faster. I’m sometimes frustrated that some operations seem to take too long. My expectations have changed during the past 22 years, but I’m also doing things with this computer that I never would have imagined doing with the Apple IIe.

My Apple IIe came fully loaded with 64K of RAM memory, the maximum amount of memory that could be directly accessed by the 6502 CPU. The Apple Writer word processor fit into a lean 16K, leaving ample memory for documents of about twenty pages. Longer documents could be saved in a series of files. Having plenty of RAM, I got spoiled. I’ve stuffed my current machine with 2.5 gigabytes of RAM — more than 40,000 times as much memory as my Apple IIe. When that’s not enough, the operating system on my current machine can use virtual memory to make it seem as if I’ve got even more memory.

My Apple IIe had two floppy disk drives, each capable of holding 144K of programs and data. A few programs were too complicated to fit in the machine’s 64K of RAM, so it was often a good idea to leave the program disk in one drive so segments of the program could be loaded as they were needed. The other drive could be used to hold any files I might create while running the program.

My current computer has two hard drives, totaling over 400Gb. That’s a little less than 1.5 million times as much storage as I got with my first computer. I have most of my CD collection instantly available on my computer. I can edit video clips and burn DVDs. Every now and then I look into adding more disk space.

I can’t prove this, but I feel fairly confident that when I bought my Apple IIe, I owned more computer power than existed in the entire world at the end of World War II — more than was used by the Manhattan Project that built the atomic bomb, more than was used by the code-breakers at Bletchley Park to crack the German Enigma codes, more than was possessed by all the governments on both sides of the war.

It’s nice to have the latest and greatest hardware and software, but a fast computer is no substitute for a good brain.