D.Hayden Posted September 25, 2008 Share Posted September 25, 2008 I've been in the PC world since the early days (early 80s - PCs 8088, 8086.. 1MB memory.. finally 10MB hard drives) My new phone takes a Micro-SD card.. I was ordering some stuff.. decided to get one.. just to put some music on it.. And it came with the SD holder, so I can use it as SD card too all for only $7.99 for a 2GB card... simply mind boggling how far things have gone in 20 years... It's like disk storage: I have a small development server that has 2.5 TBs (2 packages of 147GB wide SCSI drives) on it for SQL work... 20 years ago it could have stored our entire companies on-line systems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
outerlimits Posted September 25, 2008 Share Posted September 25, 2008 yea dave...capacity is the shi$hole. in 84 i started with 8 round mags...went to super and 10 round mags...then chip gave us 20 rounds+, glenn brought the game up to 30+, and then there was that beta mag i found somewhere... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MichiganShootist Posted September 25, 2008 Share Posted September 25, 2008 My hand held GPS unit has about thirty times more memory than the huge water cooled Burroughs main frame (nearly a half block long and a full story high with 8 or 10 operators) that my employer had in the late 1960s. I think it's a ripoff that PC memory cards are still so much more expensive that SD type memory. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rvb Posted September 25, 2008 Share Posted September 25, 2008 (edited) My hand held GPS unit has about thirty times more memory than the huge water cooled Burroughs main frame (nearly a half block long and a full story high with 8 or 10 operators) that my employer had in the late 1960s.I think it's a ripoff that PC memory cards are still so much more expensive that SD type memory. common, as a practical shooter you should KNOW that SPEED AINT CHEEP. True for electronics, too. -rvb eta: Small bus widths and slow performance is why the SD stuff is cheap. You'd be lucky to be able to surf BE.com if your PCs memory was made of that stuff it would be so slow. Edited September 25, 2008 by rvb Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BrianH Posted September 25, 2008 Share Posted September 25, 2008 When I started working for TDK's Spindle Motor Division in '94 the hot product we were on was for the 9GB Seagate Baracuda. That's almost ram today. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
D.Hayden Posted September 25, 2008 Author Share Posted September 25, 2008 We're basically at or well beyond 1000X multipliers of all the copmments.. except the chip speeds.. Figuring the first IBM XTs: 4.77 Mhhz 1MB memory 10MB Disk Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rvb Posted September 25, 2008 Share Posted September 25, 2008 (edited) We're basically at or well beyond 1000X multipliers of all the copmments.. except the chip speeds.. Figuring the first IBM XTs: 4.77 Mhhz 1MB memory 10MB Disk Even that's way understating the improvements. Again... it's about SPEED data rate. Size and clock speed are not the whole picture. Sure, your HDD is 1000x bigger, but access times, spin rate, buffering, etc are way improved so 1000x doesn't even begin to compare them. Same with memory, we now have DDR and dual ports where data comes on both clock edges and reads and writes at the same time, and bus speeds are monster. So again 1000x doesn't even come close to true improvement. The u-processors seem to be the easiest comparison, but clock speed doesn't tell you anything, really. when you start considering the bus widths, the pipelining, the on-board cache rams, and now we have multi-core u-ps, 1000x wouldn't even begin to compare, so true performance gain the processors have seen is lightyears ahead of the periferals. When you start having clock periods in the ps, you get to a point you just can't go any faster w/ trasistor designs. So you get performance by design, ie doing more in parrallel on each clock cycle vs trying to pump the data serially like on that old IBM you mentioned. I'd bet measured in "flops" or operations per second the improvement factor would be in the millions, not thousands. Now, if we weren't burdoned w/ such crappy bloated software (thank you MS) your computer would REALLY scream. Why should a word processing tool require such computing power??? -rvb ETA: Realize that more memory is GOOD so less gets written to the HDD, but if you are a casual user, faster mem is more important that bigger mem. Pull up your system monitor right now and see how much of the ram is being used. [ctrl-alt-del]. Right now I'm using 25% and my computer is a couple years old. Bigger RAM is really only critical if you are a real power user (not just typing all day, but running engineering software or crunching a lot of data). -rvb [microelectronics design engineer by day, practical shooter by night] Edited September 25, 2008 by rvb Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rvb Posted September 25, 2008 Share Posted September 25, 2008 I've been in the PC world since the early days (early 80s - PCs 8088, 8086.. 1MB memory.. finally 10MB hard drives) My new phone takes a Micro-SD card.. I was ordering some stuff.. decided to get one.. just to put some music on it.. And it came with the SD holder, so I can use it as SD card too all for only $7.99 for a 2GB card... simply mind boggling how far things have gone in 20 years... It's like disk storage: I have a small development server that has 2.5 TBs (2 packages of 147GB wide SCSI drives) on it for SQL work... 20 years ago it could have stored our entire companies on-line systems. The coolest thing is the usb hard drives. Hell, I'm only 30 and I remember trying to back up on those clunky tape drive system. Took all night, was noisy, the error correction and verification took forever. Now you plug in a USB cable and back up your entire PC in minutes. How long before we have a complete OS/computer on a thumb drive? Just plug into your keyboard which has built-in video drivers??? ..... take your computer with you...... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
J-Ho Posted September 26, 2008 Share Posted September 26, 2008 I remember getting our first 10 meg hard drive. Man I thought there was no way I'd ever fill that thing up. And now micro sd cards are 4-6 GIGAbytes and so damn small my blocky hands can barely handle the damn things. It reminds me of a sci-fi book I read recently. It was written in the early 80's and set in the near future. A character had a prototype machine that was a TV, a phone, and linked to the computer. All in a small box. All he had to do was plug it in to a wall jack. I like being ahead of the future! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iainmcphersn Posted September 26, 2008 Share Posted September 26, 2008 I've been in the PC world since the early days (early 80s - PCs 8088, 8086.. 1MB memory.. finally 10MB hard drives) My new phone takes a Micro-SD card.. I was ordering some stuff.. decided to get one.. just to put some music on it.. And it came with the SD holder, so I can use it as SD card too all for only $7.99 for a 2GB card... simply mind boggling how far things have gone in 20 years... It's like disk storage: I have a small development server that has 2.5 TBs (2 packages of 147GB wide SCSI drives) on it for SQL work... 20 years ago it could have stored our entire companies on-line systems. The coolest thing is the usb hard drives. Hell, I'm only 30 and I remember trying to back up on those clunky tape drive system. Took all night, was noisy, the error correction and verification took forever. Now you plug in a USB cable and back up your entire PC in minutes. How long before we have a complete OS/computer on a thumb drive? Just plug into your keyboard which has built-in video drivers??? ..... take your computer with you...... Know what you mean, my first PC had the Bill Gates recommended 640K RAM and two 720K disk drives. Now my phone has an 8GB micro-SD card that pops into a little USB adapter. Since I carry the adapter around, I got another 2GB micro-SD card that lives in it to use as a thumb drive. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
joecichlid Posted October 1, 2008 Share Posted October 1, 2008 I remember back in the day when I got my first PC, ram was roughly $100 a meg, now you can get a 1TB hard drive for about that. Joe W. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pevadijk Posted October 1, 2008 Share Posted October 1, 2008 When I got out of school in 1992 I bought a brand new 486sx with a 120mb HD and 2mb memory and it costed about $1500 and later I installed 4mb extra which costed about $400. And the first cd-rom players where very expensive, but I was THE MAN because I had one. Nowadays a computer is an appliance that you throw away after 3-4 years and the one that you buy then, is bigger better and a lot cheaper ;-) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dajarrel Posted October 1, 2008 Share Posted October 1, 2008 Mag-tape storage 8" floppy disk 5.25 " floppy disk 3.5" floppy disk thumb drives. My first one was a 256Kb. Now I carry a 2 GB in my pocket and it's two years old. SD cards telephone storage not much bigger than your fingernail. As long as the interfaces can be miniaturized, the devices will continue to get smaller. Beware the chip installed under the skin and RF scanned for interface. I just wish I could reduce my size over time like computer storage has fwiw dj Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nomasterblaster Posted October 1, 2008 Share Posted October 1, 2008 I remember when I got a 20MB hard drive and color card for my XT whoooohoooooo. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
High Lord Gomer Posted October 1, 2008 Share Posted October 1, 2008 The first computer that I bought for myself was an AST 286 that ran at 10, count 'em, 10 MHz. I even paid extra to get the extra 384K to make a full MB of memory. Only problem was I didn't know what to do with all that extra memory (that DOS couldn't directly use). I setup a RAM drive so I could load the C compiler more quickly. I still have a box of 8" diskettes from my System 36 days, and they were much beter than hanging 9-track types on the Univac 1108 that also had a magnetic drum drive. OMG, I just realized how damned OLD I am!!! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chris Posted October 2, 2008 Share Posted October 2, 2008 I've been in the PC world since the early days (early 80s - PCs 8088, 8086.. 1MB memory.. finally 10MB hard drives) My new phone takes a Micro-SD card.. I was ordering some stuff.. decided to get one.. just to put some music on it.. Not like you ever turn the thing on anyways! Nobody will ever need more than 640k RAM!" -- Bill Gates Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wgnoyes Posted October 3, 2008 Share Posted October 3, 2008 How long before we have a complete OS/computer on a thumb drive? Just plug into your keyboard which has built-in video drivers??? ..... take your computer with you...... Getting there. Look at http://portableapps.com/. I never used to like things like this and would whack the software that comes on sandisk usb keys. But this stuff really works! There's Mac-on-a-Stick app if you want to play with a portable copy of OS Classic 7.0.1. And there's talk there somewhere about a linux-on-a-stick app. Dosbox let's you carry around a MSDOS-5 lookalike (great for playing the old games like Doom2 or Wolfenstein 3D). And other sites have procedures for installing a linix distribution on a larger usb key and booting off of that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BritinUSA Posted October 3, 2008 Share Posted October 3, 2008 All this talk of memory; My first computer, it came out in UK in 1981. It had 1k of memory, that's right... 1024 bytes. Seeing the size of these memory cards that are available now is simply astonishing. I have an iPod shuffle that's about an inch across and has more space on it than I have songs to put there.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
D.Hayden Posted October 3, 2008 Author Share Posted October 3, 2008 Nice... my first had 4K.. I upgraded it to 16K.. man that was hot.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dajarrel Posted October 3, 2008 Share Posted October 3, 2008 All this talk of memory;My first computer, it came out in UK in 1981. It had 1k of memory, that's right... 1024 bytes. Seeing the size of these memory cards that are available now is simply astonishing. I have an iPod shuffle that's about an inch across and has more space on it than I have songs to put there.... Paul, I had one of those!!!! I had the best time with it. I even bought a 16K memory module. It cost $100 in about 1983-4. dj Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Merlin Orr Posted October 3, 2008 Share Posted October 3, 2008 Don't remember exactly when but upgraded mine to the latest and biggest... 4 mb for ~$700.00 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Nik Habicht Posted October 4, 2008 Share Posted October 4, 2008 Don't remember exactly when but upgraded mine to the latest and biggest... 4 mb for ~$700.00 I got into Digital Photography in 2002 --- had a bunch of 64, 128, and 256 mb cards and shelled out $300 for a 12x 512 mb Lexar compact flash card..... ....it's still around here somewhere..... Now I can buy 2 gig memory sticks for what? $20 or so? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gamingoddess Posted October 11, 2008 Share Posted October 11, 2008 7-8 years ago my brother bought me a sorta new HP laptop with a killer 512mbs of RAM, Pentium II processor, and a "whopping" 10GB hard drive. I still have it as one of many laptops collecting dust in my apartment. It's sad that now I have 16GB USB Flash Drives lying around (which is sadly more memory than entire laptops from a decade ago) that can easily be purchased cheap online...who knows what's coming next? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jman Posted October 11, 2008 Share Posted October 11, 2008 Amazes me that most of todays computers still have moving parts. Incredible link to what? 18th century data storage? I doubt will see (or hear) anything spinning in a computer in a couple years. It's a strange combination of the very new and very old. Jim Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rvb Posted October 11, 2008 Share Posted October 11, 2008 Amazes me that most of todays computers still have moving parts. Incredible link to what? 18th century data storage? I doubt will see (or hear) anything spinning in a computer in a couple years. It's a strange combination of the very new and very old.Jim I'm sure for home/entertainment use you will soon see solid state based computer systems, but they won't/can't [soon] be for power users. Only magnetic has the long term storage reliability and the unlimited write capacity. Most flash systems are still limited to 10k write cycles. And they are too sensitive (unreliable) for important data storage. For your pictures or games etc they are fine and you might never notice a flipped bit, but for banking/military/medical/etc they just don't have anywhere near the reliability required (which is why real HDDs and tape reels are still used). Maybe someday, but I doubt it'll be on silicon. -rvb Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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