Anything IT Goes
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How porn stashes have changed over the years!
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My first home computer was a ZX81 with 1MB of RAM. I ‘upgraded’ it to 64MB and a proper keyboard to replace the supposedly touch sensitive standard version.
I somehow managed to fill the hard drive on my work laptop a couple of weeks ago. It was mainly down to photos stored on it. I need to check the size of the hard drive as there’s no way I should be filling it in this day and age. Classic penny pinching in purchasing essential kit.
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I had dozens of 5 1/4 500KB discs with lab data in my filing cabinet until I retired in 2020. Decided that no-one was going to challenge my results after 30 years.
Amazing that most non-graphical software could fit onto a small number, or even just one, disc. Certainly made coders much more economical.
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It was a bespoke format used by the instrument manufacturer, I think. Bigger than the original IBM ones.
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Are these posts related?
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It's the speed of the miniaturisation that's crazy though, if you think how many centuries it took for the timepiece miniaturisation.
Graph 1, the cost per Gb - note that the Y axis is logarithmic
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It was 1KB, rather than 1MB.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Another crazy graph for notTerry.
In TerryBytes, crazy!
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IT is relative inflation busting.
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From this week's laptop purchase searching, my takeaway is that manufacturers aren't putting massive amounts of memory into new machines as standard, I guess assuming that users will utilise portable external storage solutions for what isn't stored in the cloud. As 1Tb on a micro SD card is about £90 now, adding extra memory to the spec of laptops etc is less important than the actual performance at whatever price point one is looking at. I'm not sure that there's any advantage in having that memory fixed internally (other than preventing the loss of a tiny SD card with all your memories on it).
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Yes, it was faster, but it was the same pattern of development. It's broadly the pattern of development you would expect to see.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
If someone gave you a smartphone thirty years ago would you consider it's evolution to be crazy?
That's OK, don't bother arguing for the sake of it, the answer is Yes.
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Not sure why they don't include more memory as standard as it's so cheap. I can't add additional internal memory and don't like using external drives either dangling or sticking out of a laptop (which can lose connection or get knocked) so I prefer a combination of cloud and physical back-ups* only keeping data for live projects in computer. I will temporarily download entertainment if travelling.
FWIW, I think that processing power (with headroom) is the more relevant spec to concentrate on these days.
*Physical back-ups as the internet can go down, sometimes I'm in locations without internet (yes, even the days) and write/read speeds for large working projects over the internet slows things down considerably. And host internet is usually poor when travelling.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.0 -
Oh, it had a 4TB micro SD card in it too, so it was double crazy.
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One of the nice things about the new laptop is no audibly spinning things, especially no fan. Seems slightly weird that phones never need fans, but even basic laptop ones have all had fans to cool the processor.
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This thread:
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Erm, it's exactly the speed of development that's been crazy, from nothing to what we've got, in less than one lifetime. But the degree of miniaturisation is also mind boggling too. And yes, of course I have some comprehension of how that's been done, but it's still impressive: 100,000 of those 1960s discs into some thing the size of a fingertip.
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When I started work a few yrs ago you needed 10p to ring the office then we played with CB radios for a bit then came pagers. After a bit we had the big transportable mobiles which where basically a car battery with a handset and rubber aerial followed by the yuppy brick. Fast forward to now we have mobiles that link to smart watches and kitchen appliances etc, with huge amounts of processing power and storage. The down side is we've forgotten how to speak to each over, everything is text or message.
Too many bikes according to Mrs O.0 -
I do actually feel very lucky to have witnessed the IT revolution, and realise I sound like a dinosaur (in the metaphorical sense) when I talk to pupils about life before personal computing devices. Essentially we had the same ways of storing and sharing information in the 1970s as has existed since the invention of writing in symbols on portable media.
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Some other examples:
Steam locomotive: from something that occasionally blew up and could just about manage to keep up with a horse to a record that still stands in just over one lifetime.
Jet engine: Frank Whittle submits his design in 1928. Production jet fighters by 1944. <20 years.
Radar: standard issue within the lifetime of its inventor and miniaturised sufficiently to fit inside the nose cone of a plane by the end of WW2 and now available as a 92mm long sensor.
Chip development has been fast but it's not completely different from other technological development.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
Obviously pretty much everything progresses, but this is sounding a bit Chaseyesque in trying to claim that IT development hasn't been of a different magnitude and speed, and therefore quite extraordinary.
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8", double-sided ones held about 1meg, i used to have a development system in the lab, it was about the size of a modern washing machine, it had a 50 meg winchester with umpteen platters, c. 1985 maybe
one day a head crashed, resulting in a horrific screeching noise as it ground away at the platter, fortunately it turned out that surface didn't have data on it, i managed to back the thing up to a stack of floppies without losing anything
my bike - faster than god's and twice as shiny0 -
It has the advantage of being able to feed off other developments in components (especially semiconductors), new materials and assembly (printing).
I think my point is that there isn't some great leap forward in human ingenuity. It's the multiplicative effect of smaller parallel developments combined with demand and high rewards for being able to do something a bit faster than the next guy.
If anything the more interesting question is why technology had such a comparatively glacial speed of development for so much of prehistory when we had exactly the same mental capacity.
1985 Mercian King of Mercia - work in progress (Hah! Who am I kidding?)
Pinnacle Monzonite
Part of the anti-growth coalition0 -
I think you're going for a slightly weird argument. I find the comparisons with other periods of time interesting, but to not be wowed by some tech development seems a bit odd.
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Yeah, went to type that I then thought it was so small I must be misremembering!
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Yep, think I'll by myself a 1TB SSD external drive. I'm still wary of using cloud storage, possibly irrationally and a sign of age but I like something physical. I should probably remember to back up photos etc. online more though. Just checked and my laptop is 500GB.
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A suggestion on back-ups. Have two and keep one remote in case of fire. Less relevant if you use the cloud.
The above may be fact, or fiction, I may be serious, I may be jesting.
I am not sure. You have no chance.Veronese68 wrote:PB is the most sensible person on here.1 -
I'm definitely becoming one of those dinosaurs I laughed at a decade or so back when they wouldn't move with new technology. I'll still attach a docment to an email rather than share it with OneDrive or SharePoint. Lack of understanding of them being the main issue but we used to also get problems with large drawings on SharePoint at my last company as people would work on what appeared to be the latest version as the actual latest version hadn't synched. Prior to that we had specific cloud storage but that was a PITA as everytime you opened a drawing you also had to reload all the xref files if someone else had worked on it since you last used it.
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I've also never really used Google Documents other than to open and view things it has been used to produce.
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Re the comments of saving in the cloud. I will never do that as I trust no one with my Data or pics other than myself or family. I always have 2 back up drives with pictures etc on, one of which is kept away from home. We had a company come and suggest we should have our machine operating systems / programs cloud based. Management was seriously interested until I was asked from a maintenance prospective, I just said no it was to dangerous. When asked why I demonstrated by pulling the plug on the demo rig, I explained that connection failures happen all the time as do power cuts that was enough to kill it dead. Since then we have had several software upgrade glitches go global and numerous cyber attacks. I also refuse to use mobile devices for payment, about as trustworthy as your local dodgy used car dealer.
Too many bikes according to Mrs O.0
