STS-135 T-4 Days - 1990

I was emailing with Sherry's parents about putting these messages together and how little room I have to write, compared to what I am reading to put these together.  I reflected that yesterday's post about Hubble talked about the discoveries of just 10 days of it's life.  It is booked solid every second since it launched over 20 years ago.  Nearly any picture you see of an object in space has come from the Hubble. 

The universe is so unbelievably vast and diverse the Hubble is keeping every astronomer and physicist on Earth busy analyzing their results of it's findings.  Take a few minutes and explore the Hubble.  http://hubblesite.org/.  Here are two more pictures:

After the return to flight from Challenger, the shuttle performed a busy schedule of missions leading up to the International Space Station (ISS).  We launched probes to Venus and Saturn, numerous communications satellites, increasing communications around the world.  We even had missions to Mir, the Russian space station.  Performed more Spacelab experiments and made multiple trips to expand Hubble.  The list of missions is staggering, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_space_shuttle_missions. 

In 1990, Mallory was born and the family had moved to Salem to live and play at the lake.  My tech world was evolving.  We had the ability to send messages to each other at work on our computer terminals, but we still couldn't send them to other  companies.  We would get our first cell phone, which was so big, it had to be built into the car.  The Web and HTTP would be first proposed at the end of the year.  We had a Macintosh computer at home I used for records, writing, and keeping track of finances.  It had a 20 meg disk drive, about enough for 8 iTunes songs.  My current PC has 1 Terabyte disk, 200,000 times larger.  There was an Apple network, called AppleTalk to connect multiple Macintoshes to share a printer. 

I was working at Data General building computer networks.  What would evolve into the ability we all have to connect computers together was being born.  The early Ethernet was running 1,000 times faster than the 9600 bps connection we used for computer terminals, but was too expensive for homes.  It used a cable the diameter of a penny and could only support a limited number of devices.  Different companies were competing over network standards.  It would be a few more years before TCP/IP, the protocol of the Internet would win out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web