He spoke of the early computers using relays. There was a photo of an early pioneer - Grace Hopper. Legend has it that during an early failure, she spotted a moth that had shorted the circuits and was the first one to "debug" a computer.

He worked through the technological advances. They went from relays to vacuum tubes. Memory was in a small piece of magnetic material. Each one was able to store a binary digit or "bit". 8 Bits became a "byte" that could represent a letter or character. The memory core had these pieces of material in grids. In an early model, a 16 cm x 16 cm (6.25" x 6.25") could store 128 x 128 bits or 2048 bytes of data.

John talked about the invention of the transistor in 1947 and the integrated circuit in 1958. He went through some key milestones for personal computing including Apple in 1977 and Macintosh in 1984.

He talked about the storage media going to tapes due to the cost of memory core. They had large reel tapes, and then went to "floppy" drives of 8", 5.25" and 3.5". There were advances in hard drives and now flash drives storing many GB (gigabytes). 1 GB is a billion bytes or about 1/2 MILLION of those early 6.25" squares of memory. To get that much memory, it would be over 50 miles long or about 3 acres!

There were questions and comments about computers. Hap told the group about the latest computer acronym - PICNIC. Problem in Chair, Not In Computer.

Thanks for the wonderful speech!

UPCOMING EVENTS

UPCOMING SPEAKERS

Welcome to Steve Yunck, our newest member! Here he is on the left with Charlie Clark, his sponsor, talking a little about him. He is an Assistant Professor of Communications at UW-P. he got his undergraduate degree from UW-Stevens Point and graduate degrees from UW-Madison. He likes to bike, play cribbage and watch movies.

Steve Lane was the lucky one selected. He drew the 6 of Spades and won $2. Good Luck to next week’s winner.

Oratorical Contest will be held during the March 12 meeting.

Milt Rewey has the Scholarship Committee ready to review the 44 applications. We select 4 candidates and the school selects the final 2 who will get the $500 scholarships.

Holly Cook and Emily Doan chaired the Essay contest for the 2 clubs. Matthew Klimesh from Cuba City High School and Emma Burton from Iowa-Grant High School were the winners. Sumaia Masoom from Platteville was 2nd.

The District Tri-Star Basketball contest will be on March 20. Our Tri-Star Basketball competition will be on Saturday March 13, at the Armory, the week before the SWIS District competition.

The next Board Meeting will be on Thursday, March 11th at 7 AM at Badger Brothers.