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We've come a long way

People's Champ ,
Nov 15, 2017 Nov 15, 2017

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10-Megabyte-PC-for-only-5995.jpg

~Gutterfish

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Community Expert ,
Nov 16, 2017 Nov 16, 2017

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Guide ,
Nov 16, 2017 Nov 16, 2017

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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?!?

jetsonscar.jpg

--OB

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People's Champ ,
Nov 16, 2017 Nov 16, 2017

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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

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Guide ,
Nov 16, 2017 Nov 16, 2017

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Gutter-Fish  wrote

The day I'm able to print a cheeseburger with bacon I'll be in heaven.

LOL! Would you settle for a pancake?

https://www.crateandbarrel.com/dash-pancakebot-pancake-printer/s245495

--OB

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Community Expert ,
Nov 21, 2017 Nov 21, 2017

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Your post reminded me of these postcards from the past that illustrated what people thought the future might look like. Enjoy! Postcards of what people in 1900 thought the future would look like - Business Insider

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Community Expert ,
Nov 21, 2017 Nov 21, 2017

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I used 2 of these vintage pictures in january/february 2000 for a (French) magazine but I had never seen the rest of the series (the article was provided with the pictures).

Thank you !

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Community Expert ,
Nov 16, 2017 Nov 16, 2017

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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

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Guide ,
Nov 16, 2017 Nov 16, 2017

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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!

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Community Expert ,
Nov 16, 2017 Nov 16, 2017

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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.

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Guide ,
Nov 17, 2017 Nov 17, 2017

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Oh heavens! Cassette drives! I had almost forgotten!

I was talking about this thread, and old technology in general, with a co-worker, and I actually had to go find a photo of a punch card to show her. She'd never even heard of one. Talk about feeling old...

--OB

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Community Expert ,
Nov 17, 2017 Nov 17, 2017

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Don't forget 8-track tapes.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User, Community Expert & Moderator
Alt-Web Design & Publishing ~ Web : Print : Graphics : Media

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Community Expert ,
Nov 18, 2017 Nov 18, 2017

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OldBob1957  wrote

Oh heavens! Cassette drives! I had almost forgotten!

I was talking about this thread, and old technology in general, with a co-worker, and I actually had to go find a photo of a punch card to show her. She'd never even heard of one. Talk about feeling old...

--OB

Some buddies and I got hold of some punch tape teleprinters back in the BBC Micro days, with a view to making them interface as printers.  They were a big as a house, and none of us got one to interface with our computers.  I think whoever was getting rid of them was pleased to be rid of them though. 

The irony is that we actually took a step backwards from there, because the first printers we could actually afford for home use were the dot matrix which produced output like this:

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.

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Community Expert ,
Nov 18, 2017 Nov 18, 2017

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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.

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Guide ,
Nov 21, 2017 Nov 21, 2017

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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

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Community Expert ,
Nov 21, 2017 Nov 21, 2017

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I've still got a dot matrix printer and a couple of cases of paper for it taking  up room in my storage area, but can't bear to get rid of it.

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Community Expert ,
Nov 18, 2017 Nov 18, 2017

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OldBob1957  wrote

I was talking about this thread, and old technology in general, with a co-worker, and I actually had to go find a photo of a punch card to show her. She'd never even heard of one. Talk about feeling old...

--OB

That reminds me of an old saying that you never hear any more, but was common at the time:

”Do not fold, bend, spindle or mutilate.”

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Community Expert ,
Nov 17, 2017 Nov 17, 2017

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

worlds most famous picture photographer- Chuck O

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Community Expert ,
Nov 22, 2017 Nov 22, 2017

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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!

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LEGEND ,
Nov 23, 2017 Nov 23, 2017

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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.

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Community Expert ,
Nov 23, 2017 Nov 23, 2017

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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.  

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People's Champ ,
Nov 23, 2017 Nov 23, 2017

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LATEST

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

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