BCUG Guest Speaker

It seems that this winter season is bringing us greater recognition of the talented folks that we have at BCUG. In our efforts to bring to our members and friends the very best experience in speakers and presentations at our general meetings, we are promoting and honoring our local talent in the form of our December speaker.

We are happy to announce that our own Bill Chriss will discuss current trends in personal technology this month. He will tell us about the PC experience and how those trends have affected how we live and work. You may remember Bill's presentations to the club in January 2013, January 2011, the spring of 2002, the winter of 1990 and the fall of 1996 where he described the personal computing and Internet experience at those times and how they changed how we communicated and "computed".

This presentation looks at the current state of this personal technology (nee computing) experience and the trends that are driving it. He'll also offer some provocative discussion about the issues and opportunities provided by those advances.

We know already that there have been many changes. Just take a look at the latest version of the iPhone, how smartphones and the Android OS have emerged. Look at how people are using their smartphones to take videos and pictures, while DSLRs are now "mirrorless", an advanced innovation in picture-taking. Imagine how things were when we had to rely on television and radio to get important information to us. In addition we are not only a more technical culture, but we are also a very visual society, vis a vis the development of FaceBook and Pinterest, among other venues. Don't forget how more and more people are paying bills and banking online. And when was the last time you received a paper letter in the mail? Or held a glue-bound book down on a table while trying to drink your coffee?

I haven't even mentioned social networking, and how that alone has been the subject of several of our programs. It is unavoidable, inevitable, and ubiquitous. In fact, this article itself will travel channels and find its way to FaceBook, the Internet and many missives to privately emailed friends. There are so many ways our lives have changed due to technology and the use of personal communications devices.

I'll have to let Bill decide what to "leave out". We appreciate Bill's willingness to put this all together for us in some sort of order.

If anyone is qualified, he is. Bill is a BCUG member who has a long history of personal computing, from the days of the Atari 400, and the Internet, running the UNIX version of the Mosaic browser on a SUN workstation before the PC version was available. While professionally he has developed computers that masquerade as business telephones and tries to "break" computers that provide multiple Internet and entertainment, his home hobby shop is filled with several computers with various operating systems and applications and a smart phone and tablet that give him a computing and communications experience while on the move.