1GB then and now

[jtr1962]

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.

 

[mubs]

The first computers I worked on had no disk drives; they were too expensive to have.

All data storage and processing was done off tapes; the system had 4 tape drives. Read master file from drive 1; read transaction files from drives 2 & 3, and write updated master file to drive 4.

Of the 4 systems the company had (one in each location), only one had a disk drive - a 5 MB one. It was used exclusively for sorting data. We were always awed by how quickly sorting could be accomplished with the disk drive as opposed to using 4 tape drives (which required multiple passes of reading and writing to eventually get the data sorted).

:-D

(see, I'm reaaaaaaally old)

 

[ddrueding]

My first computer was a laptop

It was an Epson HX-20(dual procs!), with the optional tape drive!

It was mine from 1985 until 1988, when I dropped it. I cried. I was 8.

 

[Bozo]

My first experiance with computers were with the ones that read from cassette tapes. We also had a computer (Digital Equipment) that had Winchester drives in it. That computer was used up until about 8 years ago. In it's later years, you had to watch the lights on the front and listen for this particular noise, then kick the cabinet to get the drives to spin up.
After that it worked fine.

Bozo :joker:

 

[Mercutio]

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.

 

[Fushigi]

The first PCs I used were Apple ][ models. Later on the ][+ and ][e. They were single or dual-floppy (SS-SD) with 48-64K RAM. I never used a cassette-only micro.

The first PC I owned was a Zenith Z-151 PC clone with 320K RAM and CGA graphics. Dual 360K floppies. I've never bought another and have been upgrading it ever since (sort of like George Washington's axe). The first HD was 10MB which got replaced by a Seagate 30MB RLL. WHat it has turned into has been outlined in my PC upgrade thread a few months ago.

BTW that Zenith went from power switch to DOS prompt in 4 seconds.

When I worked at Fox Photo in the 80s the Kodak film printers were programmed by paper tape. I don't think they had disk-type storage at all.

The first "big" system I managed had 3 or 4 600MB disk packs with each pack consisting of 10 or so 12 inch platters in a 70 pound pack that mounted on a washing machine-sized unit. The minicomputer itself, a Geac 8000, had 4 CPUs, one each dedicated to program, comm, tape, and disk. It ran at a blistering 4MHz and supporting 270 concurrent users running a proprietary OS & app suite. We later upgraded to the "turbo" 8MHz model. The system bus was wire-wrapped. The tape drive was 1200 or 2400 bits per inch on 1/2" round reel.

Today one of the systems I manage has 2 2.2GHz Power5+ CPUs, 48GB RAM, and 3TB of 15K RPM SCSI disk (54x70GB in RAID5). The other has 2 1.6GHz Power5 CPUs, 32GB RAM, and 5TB (42x140GB in RAID5) disks.

My phone has 1GB+64MB RAM, my keychain has 4GB (thumb drive), and my camera has 8GB.

 

[mubs]

My description was of an IBM 1401 mainframe with 16k of core memory. It was a data center on which we did jobs - general ledger, payroll, BoM, etc.

 

[Will Rickards]

Are we sharing first PC stories? Well mine was a packard bell 486 SX 25Mhz system. I have no idea what storage system it had. I think I upgraded it to a DX 50Mhz or something.
Yes my 8GB flash drive seems huge compared to the storage of that entire computer. Yet we fill it up faster now.

I don't know what the future holds for storage. I don't think jtr is correct in his prediction though. I think his prediction goes too far. I don't think they'll increase the data density many more times.

 

[Mercutio]

Packard Bell SX/25? Probably had 120 or 210MB drive in it. I worked on lot of those.

First PC in my house was a Honeywell XT clone. We had a hard drive for it and dual 360k floppies. It came with 256k RAM that was upgraded to 640k the day we got it. It came with Xenix, and I didn't get a DOS boot floppy until about a year later.

First PC of my own was a 286/16 with Hercules mono graphics, most of the parts lovingly picked out from Computer Shopper.

 

[udaman]

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 ?

 

[Mercutio]

Filled with pr0n in just weeks , do you have a catalog listing of 'old-classics', lol ?

I know what I got and from when. I had to ship a bunch of my video files off to tape about a year ago, but I still have about 250GB of image files, and I'm sure I can pick out the ones I got back in 1994 from the others.

One of the first useful computer programs I wrote was to batch resize the images I was downloading from USENET so I could have room to store more stuff. I was also doing wacky stuff like dynamically compressing and decompressing text files as I needed them.

On the shared student system at Purdue (15k user accounts) I was in second place behind 'root' as the person using the most disk space on that machine... and I had the same 2MB quota as everyone else. I was doing stuff like running cron jobs to move things around in /tmp so it wouldn't get deleted, compressing my whole login directory (expanding it to /tmp), and using a huge chunk of my mail spool as a virtual file system.

 

[LOST6200]

My first computer was a laptop

It was an Epson HX-20(dual procs!), with the optional tape drive!

It was mine from 1985 until 1988, when I dropped it. I cried. I was 8.

Danme, when I was 8 we only had the sliderrules.

 

[udaman]

Blast from the past

Thought maybe some of you who complain about how much a 64GB SSD drive would cost, and how you'd not buy one until the price becomes more 'reasonable' should be reminded it's all relative.

Take a look at these MacWorld magazine ads from a couple of old MW magazines I'm about to throw out (Macromedia for Merc ) from 1999 and one going way, way back to 1995...absolutely eons ago. Now project into the future at what all the young farts will be dealing with in a dozen or so years complaining about how this or that costs too much . Now if I could only have my OM-1 FF digicam of the same size/weight as original 35mm film version, for less than $500...before I die, damn it!

(scanned quick N dirty @150dpi)

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v103/udaman/MagC-D-Chr parts/Control-macromedia-dom-ad.jpg

RAM used to be insanely expensive back in 1995, dropped dramatically by 1999 (must have been a combination of global warming and Gore inventing the internet that brought the prices down), gains haven't been so exponential since then and now.

How's about a 50GB Barracuda for only $3k, or a 10k Cheetah 36GB for $2.3k. Yeah and all you young hot rod whimps complain about how much a 64GB SDD costs, you're not worthy if you can't pony up a grand for the fastest drive out there.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v103/udaman/MagC-D-Chr parts/MW1995ad3.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v103/udaman/MagC-D-Chr parts/MW1999ad2.jpg

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v103/udaman/MagC-D-Chr parts/MW1999ad1.jpg

 

[jtr1962]

Those prices bring back memories (no pun intended). I remember when I first started getting into computers in late 1998. Next year a friend gave me his old 386-40. I was happy to spend a whopping $99 to fill all the slots with 32 MB of RAM. That seemed like a ridiculous amount compared to the second-hand 386-33 with 8 MB which I had been using. Windows 3.1 positively flied with that much RAM! I also remember looking back at some old catalogs from c. 1995 (I still have them someplace). I was fond of saying how the RAM in my 386 would have cost upwards of $1000 only a few years ago. I was also thrilled to find an 8 GB hard drive for that machine for "only" $129. Only a year before that, you would be hard-pressed to buy any size drive for much under $300. I had to use a drive overlay to recognize the full capacity on that old machine. Later on a Promise controller fulfilled the same function.

I'm sure the ubiquity of computers which started in the late 1990s was directly caused by the falling prices of both RAM and hard disks. At one time those two items alone could reasonably be expected to cost upwards of $1000 in unadjusted dollars (>$1500 in today's dollars), even in a basic system. By the early 2000s hard drives seemed to stop falling in price, stabilizing at about $70 on the low end. However, the declining prices of RAM allowed better and better systems at a given price point. Around 2000, 512 MB of RAM (about the most Win 98 could reasonably use) probably ran about $1000. As a result many systems had to make due with 128 MB or even less, with swap files taking up the slack. Nowadays 2 GB of RAM is about as much as most people will ever reasonably use. That amount can be had for under $50, easily within reach on a budget system. It even seems reasonable to put 4 GB in a new system these days, despite the fact that few users will ever be able to use all that RAM. I don't expect prices on most things to fall much in the future, with the exception of SSDs. Those are still on a steep development curve. I guess RAM won't get much cheaper per stick than it is now, but larger capacity RAM chips will probably put 4 GB DIMMs at the $50 price point in a year or two. Now it'll be up to the software writers to find something to make use of all this stupidly cheap RAM. It's already reached the point where the idea of hard-disk based page files no longer make any sense given that even a budget machine can have 2 GB. Much as has happened with hard disks, RAM capacity is outpacing the ability of most users/software to make use of it. I see many new motherboards with capacity for up to 16 GB RAM. I wonder if at any time in their useful lives anything run on these machines will actually have need of that much memory. Remember that 16 GB was a good-sized hard drive only 5 or 6 years ago. Even nowadays a lot of people can get by with that much storage.

 

[paugie]

I bought my first flash disk a year ago. It was 1Gb for P1,450. Last week I bought 1Gb flash disk for P420. I was so surprised because I checked the prices just 2 days before purchasing and it was P600 for that 1Gb flash disk. Now 4Gb flash disk costs less than what I paid for 1Gb last year.

 

[Bozo]

Clossus runs again.

http://www.tnmoc.org/ColRbd.htm

http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/news/docview.rhtm/474682

Bozo :joker:

 

[ddrueding]

With 21MP images being easy to produce, 16GB or RAM can be chewed through in no time. Or I can run a mid-sized office's worth of virtual servers on a single machine for testing purposes.