[Closed] Aren't computers incredible these days?

Talking last night about memory with my son, and I said pretty much the same - although I do remember when a MB seemed an unreal number...

We do document imaging (scanning) and can convert a warehouse full of archive boxes on pallet racking into a single portable hard drive no bigger than a fag packet.
What's more you can search all the scanned images for a single word/phrase in seconds.
Neat 🙂

Compared to my first PC, I've got sixteen times as much storage capacity on my keyring.

We do document imaging (scanning) and can convert a warehouse full of archive boxes on pallet racking into a single portable hard drive no bigger than a fag packet.

Which, of course, you then back up, right? (-:

I remember my first computer - a BBC B - had 32k of ram.

I'm always struck by the capacity shifts in USB pen drives.

When they launched they were about 2 - 3 inches long and a 32meg one was around £120 (around 2000, 2001)!

I used to load Scan's daily deals page religiously hoping to see them on a bargain day 🙂

Now you can get 32GB for under £20 and it's the size of your thumbnail!
http://www.mymemory.co.uk/USB-Flash-Drives/HP/HP-32GB-v165w-USB-Flash-Drive?affid=47868&awc=1152_1331202684_01a2a42f07f2615712183dd598bcc605

The computing power onboard the Saturn 5 rockets that took humans to the moon and back were roughly the equivalent of what it takes to power a simple electronic calculator.

Which, of course, you then back up, right? (-:

A terabyte! I can remember when that was an utterly unfathomable amount of data.

I maintain an enterprise-grade SAN for a customer which contains sixteen 3.5" SCSI hard disks; the total storage capacity is 2Tb. So even by relatively current terms, you've got eight full-sized hard disks in the palm of your hand there.

Even as a technophobe, even I have to acknowledge that modern computery stuff is fairly impressive.

It's rather depressing knowing that despite it's huge potential and capability, 99% of us just use it for 'Liking' things on FaceBook and watching people fall over on YouTube. Oh, and posting opinions that nobody cares about on forums.

Computers are rather like the human brain - massive potential/ability, but we only really use about 1% of it 🙂

I had a disk drive for my BBC. Held 100k on a disk.

we never supply a single copy of the data

Good good. As you were, then.

I just had a mental image of, "yes, so we've taken your entire filing room and copied it onto this little black box here and, whoops...!" *thud* "oh." (-:

1K of ram on my ZX81, typing basic programs in from magazines, jumpers for goal posts...

I maintain an enterprise-grade SAN for a customer which contains sixteen 3.5" SCSI hard disks; the total storage capacity is 2Tb. So even by relatively current terms, you've got eight full-sized hard disks in the palm of your hand there.

And therein lies my least favourite job - explaining why 4Tb of storage on a Netapp cost them around 40 grand when they can buy 4 of said pocket sized disks for a monkey...

Computers are rather like the human brain - massive potential/ability, but we only really use about 1% of it

Except some of your mundane things use significant amounts of processing power. To do really clever stuff you can usually get away with a lot less power than you need to watch people falling over on YouTube.

Computers are rather like the human brain

I do remember when a MB seemed an unreal number...

Mmmm.. .Zx81...

[img] [/img]

Launched in 1981 for £70 (assembled), just 1kB of main memory, with and add-on pack to take it to 16kB.

(For reference the Singletrack text logo at the top of this page is 14kB).

Still very useful today though:
[img] [/img]

http://oldcomputers.net/zx81.html

Remember getting my first 60Mb hard disk for an Atari ST - seemed like a ridiculously large amount of data.

[img] [/img]

The computing power onboard the Saturn 5 rockets that took humans to the moon and back were roughly the equivalent of what it takes to power a simple electronic calculator.

That's probably unfair to calculators. (-:

The processing 'heavy lifting' for guidance and such was done on the ground (and a lot of that was by clever men and slide rules). The Saturn V's instrumentation computers were something like a 2MHz CPU, 32K of RAM, IIRC.

Sharkbait, out of interest, just how long does it take to scan that amount of data?

I maintain an enterprise-grade SAN for a customer which contains sixteen 3.5" SCSI hard disks; the total storage capacity is 2Tb. So even by relatively current terms, you've got eight full-sized hard disks in the palm of your hand there.

At the risk of geek pedantry here but you're comparing apples to oranges!

The 15k RPM disks in your (i suspect rapidly ageing if they're scsi rather than SAS) enterprise SAN are nothing like the 7.2k RPM disk that'll be in the external HDD.

[url= http://www.infoworld.com/d/storage/infoworld-review-dell-iscsi-san-sizzles-ssd-dynamic-storage-tiering-625 ]This stuff is blowing my mind though - Storage that know where it needs to be...[/url]

4TB drives on the market now, I'll have four of those in a raid 10 array please.

I bought a 512KB expansion for my Amiga back in 1990 for a whopping £89. That meant I could play It Came From The Desert and Dungeon Master. A whopping one megabyte of RAM...as much as eight ZX Spectrum +2s!

The first hardrive I bought for the above cost me an absolute fortune - 420MB. My mates all filled their 200MB drives up and I opted to spend a little more for double the capacity. Within four years, I replaced that with a 4GB drive. Yep, it cost me a small fortune but I figured that it was practically limitless storage...4GB could hold an awful lot of grumble - sorry, I meant Deluxe Paint HAM images and hard drive installable games.

And then along came a PC with Windows 98 installed...4GB suddenly seemed quite tiny.

Remember in my first job, we needed to buy a 1Gb external HDD. That was massive, and was a special order. Now you get that on a camera/phone storage card so small (*too* small) that you really don't want to drop it, and would need at least 4-8x that for a reasonable base OS install on pretty much anything.

a warehouse full of archive boxes on pallet racking into a single portable hard drive no bigger than a fag packet

Brilliant 🙂

When I first moved to London, we ran the Bank of Scotland International Trading system on a system with 16K of memory.

<rant>

What's truly scary is how much of this capacity and power is wasted.

I've now got roughly 20 times the power and capacity that I had in 2000, but I can't really do anything that I couldn't back then.
Editing HD video is probably the only thing that comes close, but there were plenty of people doing that back then too.

Thankfully we're finally getting to a state where we've got single devices to optimize for. Working on iPhone/iPad apps is a joy compared to Windows. Focussing on function/efficiency/innovation rather than just 'more'.

Since the early 90s I've been having arguments with people about why computers aren't more like 'appliances'. 90% of people want 90% of the same things, yet every edition of Windows is limited heavily by the fact that the 10% of people are treated as equal to the 90%.

</rant>

I remember my first computer - a BBC B - had 32k of ram.

the B was hot!

Sharkbait, out of interest, just how long does it take to scan that amount of data

When DVD video first appeared they had to be rendered in special mastering labs using dedicated workstations.

They used complicated algorithms to encode a certain number of key frames (about one in every four) and then calculate the differences between the intervening frames and only store the differences.

For the time it was horrendously processor intensive and couldn't be done in real time and required high end hardware

Fast forward to today and your Sky HD Box will happily render HD content in real-time completely seamlessly and without any percievable loss in quality.

So real time video rendering which wasn't possible as few as 15 years ago on top end hardware is now in the realm of inexpensive consumer electronics

the specs of the laptop on which I am typing would have seemed way beyond pure fantasy when I was into computers as a kid.

Quite clearly you were fantasising about the wrong things as a kid 🙂

I can remember fitting 48k RAM expansion chips to our ZX Spectrum when developers started to ignore the 16k version. First ever bit of electronics fiddling - on the most expensive christmas present ever = scary.
It was worth it for Penetrator though 🙂

Found one of these bad boys in my cellar not so long ago

[img] [/img]

[i]1K of ram on my ZX81, typing basic programs in from magazines, jumpers for goal posts... [/i]

yup I remember the ZX81 days very well. My mates brother worked for Memotech and he got hold of a 64k RAM expansion for us both, we thought it would never be possible to use it all.

[img] [/img]

Kev

What's a terrabyte?

When I was doing my MSc 2001-2002 (which doesn't seem very long ago to me) someone brought in their new MP3 player, which had something like a 64Mb memory and cost about £70. We all thought it was amazing.

A while before that, I remember something on TV where they had this thing that was going to make CD players obsolete, and was for all intents and purposes an MP3 player. But they had it as the April Fool's item!

Those DVD (and BluRay too), would also be downscaling as part of the encoding process. GoPro might be 1080p, but a Red Epic certainly isn't.

What's a terrabyte?

Something to do with dinosaurs I think.

Re: Apollo, there's some incredibly geeky reading about the guidance computer [url= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Guidance_Computer ]here[/url] if anyone cares (and can understand 1960's computing terminology).

Yeti it's like a terrapin but nippier.

What's a terrabyte

What's a terrabyte?

IGMC

We're using PetaBytes here now 🙂

I'm amazed what my smart phone is capable of

I remember spending £250 on a 2x write speed CD Burner.
hmmmmm

A while before that, I remember something on TV where they had this thing that was going to make CD players obsolete, and was for all intents and purposes an MP3 player. But they had it as the April Fool's item!

I remember that. It was Philip Schofield and Sarah Green on one of the Saturday morning shows, Going Live or one of its ilk. Albums on little chips that you plugged into the player. They came clean the following week.

So what's the largest file anyone's got on their system.
Mine is unsurprisingly GoPro footage edited in Sony Vegas - producing a HD WMV file of 1.6GB!

I can chat to people on the internet instead of working.

That's enough for me.

Oh, and I never knew that women could do that with those.

4Gb database file that holds data captured from 4.6 million invoices we have scanned.
Clients' credit controllers search the database via a website and download the scanned images from our servers

What's truly scary is how much of this capacity and power is wasted

You might think that.. but how many people want to watch a bluray on their laptop, or maybe edit that video they took on their fancy phone? As above, video used to be very intenstive, and HD video was a few years ago. Also ripping CDs used to take quite a while.

I bet a lot of the websites you see nowadays wouldn't work very well on a PC from 2000. I think you forget how much better the overall experience is now than it was then. Remember we don't demand all this power just to enable us to have semi-transparent windows on our desktops - the likes of Intel, AMD, Nvidia and ATI are making new stuff because they can and because numbers sell PCs and they need to compete. Microsoft and co just use it because it's there.

Also don't underestimate how much cheaper basic stuff is now. Back in the early 90s when a 50MHz cpu seemed pie in the sky, everyday desktop PCs were about a grand. Now you can get a pretty decent sub notebook with a very useable spec for a third of that in actual money terms, never mind real terms accounting for inflation.

So what's the largest file anyone's got on their system

So what's the largest file anyone's got on their system.

Pretty much any of the virtual machines I've got, for example a fairly clean Ubuntu 32 bit Virtual Box install I made last weekend is over 8GB.

Kind of puts the 16k memory expansion pack for my vic20 into perspective, I suppose. Out of interest, how much data can you fit on a C90 cassette?

I probably got twenty 48K games onto half a C90 (for backup purposes, obviously), so, what, 1Mb per side maybe? *handwavy*

I once worked out that at 2,400bps I could get almost 1MB onto a C120, back in the days of 48K computers. That was incredible!

buuuurrrrrr bip brrrrrrrrr chhchhchhchchchchchh

Well I'm currently sat on a train posting from a device the size of a fag packet whilst running a cad program on another one the size of a notebook. Both connected wirelessly to the Internet. I have no idea how any of it works, but it just does and that's verging on miraculous.

People take it for granted, but if you did know how it worked you'd be even more amazed.

I just marvel at the amount of work that has gone into making and designing all of it, over the years.

Also don't underestimate how much cheaper basic stuff is now. Back in the early 90s when a 50MHz cpu seemed pie in the sky, everyday desktop PCs were about a grand. Now you can get a pretty decent sub notebook with a very useable spec for a third of that

Or a Raspberry Pi: 700Mhz CPU, 256Mb RAM, 2 USB ports, Ethernet, SD card reader, HDMI output, GFX chip capable of 1080p Bluray-quality playback.

$35

Speaking of the Spectrum,

You're marvelling over what can be done with modern hardware. With sufficient practice and talent, it's pretty marvellous what can be done with old hardware. Check this out.

http://zxspectrum48.i-demo.pl/zxgallery.html

For those interested in NASA software development...

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/06/writestuff.html

There was another article (which I can't find), about how they keep reviewing their code, hundreds of times over, to squeeze extra performance out of it.

A vast proportion of their code is written in Assembly, as C took up too much room...

A vast proportion of their code is written in Assembly, as C took up too much room...

Been there. Done that. Not much fun!

[img] [/img]

*applauds*

Watching Cad Cam develop over the last few years has been truly amazing .
Some design and production methods are stunning.

For MrsToast: http://www.google.com/moon/ 😉

This all reminds me of that famous misquote attributed to the top man at IBM in the 40's about how he could see a world market for at most 5 computers. I doubt he really anticipated this...

99% of us just use it for 'Liking' things on FaceBook and watching people fall over on YouTube. Oh, and posting opinions that nobody cares about on forums.

It's also slightly depressing to think that we now have instant access to so much knowledge and learning, but most of my internet time is spent reading posts on here 😐

So, anyone here operate an HPC?

AlexSimon - Member

I remember spending £250 on a 2x write speed CD Burner.
hmmmmm

I remember spending a similar amount on a double-speed CD [i]Reader[/i]!

Or a Raspberry Pi: 700Mhz CPU, 256Mb RAM, 2 USB ports, Ethernet, SD card reader, HDMI output, GFX chip capable of 1080p Bluray-quality playback.

$35

If they ever let you order the bloody things, the Farnell site was /.ed and I think it was RS I 'regsitered an interest' with along with around a million other people who live with their mums.

I bet a lot of the websites you see nowadays wouldn't work very well on a PC from 2000

That Pi thing looks interesting.

I remember spending £250 on a 2x write speed CD Burner.

So, anyone here operate an HPC?

home PCs ... are obscenely overspecced (and priced) for what they actually do

You could say the same about bikes, cars, washing machines, toasters, biro's ... coffee machines, razors, chainsaws ... 😉

You could say the same about bikes

Edit bike wise I'd like to see rigid v-braked bikes available for very little money, same as I'd like there to be cheap PCs running an optimised lightweight OS that can handle web browsing and plug into any TV/monitor. But no you get cutting edge technology for mr money bags and the low end market trying to badly emulate it. Be that shit heavy full sus bike with wooden disc brakes or a cheap PC crippled under windows 7. Cheap can be done well if you accept the limitations and do it differently.

So, anyone here operate an HPC?

Nope but I do have some 16 node vSphere clusters with 24 cores in each. The HPC stuff is not on the general network, I think there are legions of people with top pockets full of pens doing that somewhere. Probably in a hollowed out volcano, with big tanks of sharks with frickin laser beam eyes.

it is scary, sad i know but i downloaded MAME onto my laptop the other night and downloaded loads of retro games, was laughing at the size of them.

i use lots of iomega 1Tb back up drives in work for the backups.

god knows what it will be like in 20 years time.

Back in the late 1980's a mate used to work for a Data Storage company which backed up bank records, confidential company data etc back in the days when memory was too expensive for anyone but the biggest corporations. They had a warehouse full of computing power which could store about 100Gb of data. That was a simply obscene amount and any geek who heard him talking about it would be amazed.

My back-up hard-drive is 500Gb and was about £79.

640K ought to be enough for anybody

If they ever let you order the bloody things, the Farnell site was /.ed and I think it was RS I 'regsitered an interest' with along with around a million other people who live with their mums.

They'll come. Eventually. It's just a combination of them vastly underestimating demand, and not having enough money to commit to a bigger initial production run.

I suspect a lot of people will be a bit disappointed when they come though - I can't believe there are that many true geeks or people involved in educational IT (I'm both, and very excited) who understand the limitations and will appreciate them for what they are. I'm guessing that people are expecting something they're not quite going to get.

The Apollo computers also had hand-made memory made by old ladies. A change to the software used to take weeks to re-program.

Wonder how many people reading this thread know what /.ed is....

Wonder how many people reading this thread know what /.ed is....