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!

Trevor.Dennis

Community Expert

I don't think I had an actual hard drive until I'd moved from a BBC Micro (with serial number 000050) to an Amiga 1000. The BBC had an audio jack to attach a cassette drive to — for the very young, we used to store data on audio cassettes back then. The BBC Micro came with 8Kb or 16Kb of memory, and it would take minutes to load a program into that 16Kb. We used to type in games from computer magazines, and they rarely worked right off the bat because the chance of a typo was high, but much worse than that, the magazines pretty much always had mistakes in the code, and you'd have to wait till the next issue for the corrections.

We soon got the option of an external 5.25 floppy drive, and the Amiga 1000 came with a 1.44mb drive. Early editions of MS Office came on about 20 floppy drives!

I have mentioned this here before, but Guy Keweny who was the best known computer journalist back then, and who wrote for PC World, once wrote a long article in which he justified the ridiculously 400Mb (I think) hard drive he'd purchased for his home PC. I can remember reading that we'd reached the limit of what was possible, and that drives could never get bigger — I have a feeling this was in the early low Gbs time.

There's a history of hard drives on Wikipedia (well of course there is!).

History of hard disk drives - Wikipedia

What is so totally cool nowadays is that we are still moving forward at an incredible rate. I am pretty sure I still have a couple of HDDs in my system that can only do 80Mb/s. NVMe drives can do 3500Mb/s, and are so fast they use PCIe lanes. I don't even know what sizes they are available in right now. At least 1Tb, and probably 2Tb. You can now get a 60Tb SSD for $8,000 to $10,000.

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