Legend

Question

We've come a long way

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
November 16, 2017
6 replies
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Legend

I carry a 64G usb stick (about $20 on weekly special at the market I get my milk from) in my pocket for handy storage when I'm out of the office... that blows my mind when I think of it.

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

Ussnorway wrote
I carry a 64G usb stick (about $20 on weekly special at the market I get my milk from) in my pocket for handy storage when I'm out of the office... that blows my mind when I think of it.

I shot 1200Gb of 1080 video on two cameras in one day a while back. Over a terabyte of data from a single day job that needs backing up. Peter Jackson bought 32 RED Epic cameras to film The Hobbit. He used them in pairs to record 3D, so that was getting on for 250Gb per hours filing from each camera angle, if my Google search just gave me the correct figures for 4K storage.

This page says that 8K uses 48 gigerbits per second. I don't know what that works out to in meaningful storage requirements, but it is going to be insane. What is really incredible is the last link I included is discussing 8K in terms of transmitting a TV signal, and not just storing it on some esoteric server with banks of NVMe drives, or however they do it. ISTM that things are going to get more crazy by orders of magnitude, and we are not talking tens of years here.

P.M.BAuthor

Legend

Gordon Moore says "Moore's Law" ( the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles every two years) will end in 2025. That's less than ten years out. What happens then?

~Gutterfish

Chuck Uebele

Community Expert

I could never afford a new computer, so I always got my brother's hand-me-downs. My first one was a CP/M - precursor of DOS. I worte a basic program for it that calculated mortgage rates. It was so slow, you could watch each month list the rate. Used to do real estate brochures. I had a Smith-Corona Typewrite that I could plug into my computer to print out the text - much nicer than dot-matrix. The things we used to do to get things done back then!

JR Boulay

Community Expert

Chuck O'Rear, the world's most famous picture photographer.

Acrobate du PDF, InDesigner et Photoshopographe

John T Smith

Community Expert

I don't remember the capacity (5MB ??) but my first ever hard drive was about the size of a loaf of bread and connected to a circuit board inside my Apple IIe computer LONG before such were available for IBM personal computers (well, long in computer terms... probably less than a year in actual terms)

Also long before SSD drives I had a card that plugged into my IIe motherboard and, with an external power supply connected to the board, the 1MB of memory on the card stayed "live" when I turned the computer off (which I rarely did) so I could boot from the ram card instead of 5 1/4 floppy disk or external hard drive... and with the wonderful space of 1MB I had the Apple operating system and all of my usual programs resident in the ram card, with a simple Basic menu to operate everything

I eventually switched to an IBM clone due to needing a computer to run dBase 3 (and the Clipper dBase compiler) but in it's day, that Apple IIe was a very good computer with add-on products that were ahead of IBM products... especially that ram card

OldBob1957

Inspiring

I went from the build-it-yourself Texas Instruments computer kit, to the GEM OS of the Atari 400, then 800, then Mega-4, before inheriting a 2nd hand Apple IIe, and later acquiring an IBM Aptiva. Ever since, I've pretty much been an omnivore, the machine brand and OS matters far less to me than capability for what I need to do. I watch with amusement the continuing debates between the apostles of Apple vs. those of Windows.

--OB

Edit to add: Under Atari GEM on the Mega-4, I had written an emulator which could run either Apple or Windows software of the time -- and usually faster than the native machine. That was REAL fun!

OldBob1957

Inspiring

Trevor.Dennis wrote
Of course, there was always the rich buddy who had a golf-ball printer. Hearing protection was mandatory with one of these banging away, but they produced beautiful output.

At work, we had 600 and 1000 lines-per-minute band printers. Talk about loud! But, they could crank out the reports on greenbar paper... and everyone had their folded stack of greenbar with all the latest data for the day/week.

Greenbar paper, dot matrix printers, 8-track tapes ...

Wow. this is turning into a real walk down memory lane for us crotchety old fossils. Thanks, folks.

BTW: I still have a functioning 8-track player -- AND tapes!

I haven't used them in years, though. The tapes would probably disintegrate if I tried. Hmm .. I wonder if Antiques Roadshow is coming to town any time soon ...

--OB

OldBob1957

Inspiring

Maybe so. But it is 2017, almost 2018, ferheavensakes. Where's my rocket-belt, robot maid, and flying car that folds up into a briefcase so I can carry off to work at Spacely Spockets?!?

--OB

P.M.BAuthor

Legend

I should have thought about the title more carefully. We really haven't come that far in terms of the tech....we've just made the same tech smaller and cheaper. The day I'm able to print a cheeseburger with bacon I'll be in heaven.

~Gutterfish