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Terabyte drive

#61
Brad Johnson said:
Ever see someone drop a rack of punch cards? Hilarious.
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When I learned the BASIC language, the textbook made a point of noting that you could shuffle your cards, and the program would still run, because of line numbering.

We had modern gear -- a workstation made by IBM that had the exact look & feel of a keypunch, except that the data went onto an 8" floppy. The workstation even simulated the "drum card" which controls column formatting on a keypunch.
 
#66
Just 8 years ago I bought a SmartMedia memory card for my first digital camera. It cost £116 for 64MB. That's nearly £2/MB.

Earlier this year I bought a 2GB card for my phone and paid £8. That's less than 0.4 of a penny per MB.

Extrapolating, £8 will buy you a terabyte card in 2016.
 
#67
Here is an interesting one, not completelly true, but it was a pretty good guess. And while it is aimed at processors mainly, you can pretty much apply it to harddrive sizes too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

And the limits are getting closer and closer, so dont expect these great advances in chips to keep happening, we are currently using 45nm die's as standard (just a year or so ago it was 65nm), 18nm is about the theoretical limit before we need to look at something other than the standard CMOS for processors. So wonder what is going to happen after that point, sure will be interesting :D
 
#69
I remember playing the text-based "Star Trek" game in the 70s on a old TTY while my older brother ran his stacks of punch cards through the old IBM in the University of Utah Comp Sci department. I used to take the game printouts home and keep them in my room. I'm such a nerd. :rolleyes:
 
#71
Munjibunga said:
OK, I just installed a terabyte drive on my computer. In the early 1980s, my company bought a ten megabyte drive for our brand new IBM PC AT (think 80286 chip). It cost $4,000 for that drive. At that price per byte, my new drive would cost $400 millon. It was $199 at Price Club (Costco if you're not from San Diego).

Just a few years ago I visited a school district's computing center, where they had 4 terabytes of drives on line. It consisted of four full-height computer racks in a refrigerated room. My drive is the size of a Harry Potter book.

When I graduated from college, there was no such thing as a PC. When I was in 10th grade, there were no calculators, cell phones, CDs, iPods, MP3s, digital cameras, GPS, laser pointers, Wiis, Gameboys, HDTVs nor the greatest invention of all time, the TV remote control. We did have transistor radios, but there were no integrated circuits, so your radio would have two to six discrete transistors, each the size of a pencil eraser. Think how big a computer with 10 million transistors would be if each were that size. Let's not even talk about if they were tubes.

Discuss. (Save the "you're old" crap).
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hehe, ten years ago, I had 4 gigabyte of hard drive in my tower computer, now I have that in RAM in my laptop ...

:D

It's sure a crazy development!

D.Don
 
#73
hbarcat said:
Some years ago my brother bought a 1GB drive for his 486 and I told him he was an idiot because he was never going to need that much space.

:(
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I had an IBM PC my grandfather (who worked for IBM for years) gave me. He had the XT downstairs with the 10 MB hard drive I was jealous of. Then for my birthday, he got me an IBM PS/1 286 with a 30 MB hard drive! Man, I could run King's Quest 5 without the floppies with that monster! I would also get online with Prodigy and play in sim fantasy basketball and baseball leagues. I'm also the only person I've ever known who owned a COmmodore 16. Yes, I said 16.

fdeck said:
What's amazing to me is that today's typical cell phone beats those specs.
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today's dollar store calculators beat those specs. Many cell phones today are more powerful than the full blown computers of a decade ago.
 
#75
When I first entered into the IT world as an onsite service engineer for Sperry Univac, this was my mainframe.

Link Removed

When I started, it was nearing the end of it's usefulness. The drives we used had 220 MB, and was like a small washing machine. It used removable platters with 9 surfaces. A large room full of drives (48) and controllers would give you about 10 GB. After a hard crash, we would remove all the heads, replace the broken ones, and clean the rest. One time a night operator crashed 12 drives. It took us a week to do the repairs!
 

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#78
Warpticon said:
I had an IBM PC my grandfather (who worked for IBM for years) gave me. He had the XT downstairs with the 10 MB hard drive I was jealous of. Then for my birthday, he got me an IBM PS/1 286 with a 30 MB hard drive! Man, I could run King's Quest 5 without the floppies with that monster! I would also get online with Prodigy and play in sim fantasy basketball and baseball leagues. I'm also the only person I've ever known who owned a COmmodore 16. Yes, I said 16.



today's dollar store calculators beat those specs. Many cell phones today are more powerful than the full blown computers of a decade ago.
Click to expand...

When I was in the USAF a couple of friends breadboarded their first "personal computers". I don't think back then I could've imagined not doing and serious component level electronics work in decades. It was my life back then.

Right before I enlisted, a new athletic shoe hit the scene for the absurd price of $25. There were guesses as to how to pronounce it's name, Nike. Of course that paled by comparison with the coolest watch at the time, something called LEDs. $400 IIRC. I stuck with analog.

I remember when "mini computers" meant they were merely smaller than a mainframe. I used to play text based adventure games on a TI mini. Type in a command and the printer would print out the response.
 

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