I came across
this article about a state-of-the-art 1GB hard disk from 1980 recently. This really makes you appreciate today's technology. The first picture comparing the drive to a 1GB flash card is really a hoot. A more apt comparison would have been to compare a 16GB card to the roomful of refrigerator-sized drives on the bottom picture. What took up a room, and probably used some tens of kilowatts in 1980, can now fit in your pocket while using at most a fraction of a watt, and then only while reading or writing.
I guess in 2030 today's storage solutions will look just as primitive. We'll probably be able to fit tens or hundreds of terabytes in a CF-sized solid state drive. Spinning disks will probably have been obsolete for a generation by then.
Eh, I just worry about living in this and the next decade...2030 is too far away to dream about future tech...only thing you can count on is that government will move slower than expected, have massive corruption/cost over-runs, and you'll not have enough money to get by unless you (are already rich) save and invest for your old age, hoping you're still healthy enough to work.
Hmm, my college prof, had an original Altair with dual 8in floppy drives, when 'floppies' really were floppy, unlike the harder cassette versions that superceded them on PC's that remained a legacy until recently
(at least on the PC side, Mac's got rid of them in the 90's). He also knew the 'right' people, so he got to use an experimental portable computer known as the Grid. Portable is kind of a misnomer, it had a 4in B&W CRT, was the size of a small suitcase, hinge opened at one end to reveal the keyboard, had dual 5.25 floppy drives, and I think an optional internal 5MB HD. Yes, 5MB was the standard size drive on the original IBM PC, IIRC.
Hmm, if I live to 2030, perhaps LED's will be ancient technology by then? In college, there was the PDP-11 for classroom/student uses (think for Admn uses, they had a separate Vax), just to make us suffer, they required an initial 'programing' assignment be submitted to the computer via punch cards, rather than entering via computer lab monitors!
When I was 17 years old, I bought a 1.768GB Micropolis SCSI drive for about $800. It was a half-height drive, and I bought it because it represented a limitless volume of space (common IDE drives at the time were 120MB - 350MB) and the cheapest megabyte/dollar ratio I could find. It was filled within a matter of weeks of the time I got unrestricted 14.4kbps internet access while at college.
I still have the drive. It might even work.
Filled with pr0n in just weeks
, do you have a catalog listing of 'old-classics', lol ?
