Technology: How far we've come

[RegEdit]

It would take 43,691 floppy discs to hold as much data as a 64 GB Micro SD card can. LOL

 

[PcTek9]

imagine sticking that many floppy disks inside this: http://www.spymuseumstore.org/hollo...gclid=CKeYjbboy7sCFW0V7Aodb2YAYQ#.UrsKpI2A3cc
My grandfather had a hollow spy coin he showed me when I was a little boy. He brought it back from World War II from Germany. I think I still have a picture of one of my relatives standing next to Theodor Roosevelt somewhere.

 

[wefixit]

I remember my first computer having a fairly large HDD of... 3GB
Now I can stuff terabytes upon terabytes, get cloud storage and much more as you all know...

 

[frederick]

I remember my first apple computer...1 Floppy to boot, 1 floppy to play games...that was a great computer

 

[Martyn]

Yep I had a twin 5.25 floppy and no hard drive I think running dos 6.2!

 

[Markverhyden]

The first computer I did hands on work with VAX 11/785. I'd guess that all of the VAX's my employer owned at the time had less HD space than that one SD card.

 

[codegreen]

The first computer I ever used was a VIC-20, but the first computer owned by my family was a monster: a blazing 20Mhz 80286 CPU and a massive 40 megabyte hard drive. We had to split it into two partitions, as MS-DOS 3.0 couldn't handle partitions larger than 32MB.

 

[Martyn]

Actually just checked up it was dos 3.2. Optional extras that I couldn't afford were 10 or 20GB hard drives!

 

[Altster]

Y'all seen the 8" floppy diskettes? Single-sided, I might add which held a whopping 128bytes (Single-Sided).

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk

I only remember this because at the time I had seen these drives my wife was working for SORBUS as their parts department / in-house service tech. (hmm, I wonder how we met?)

Even more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

 

[Markverhyden]

Y'all seen the 8" floppy diskettes? Single-sided, I might add which held a whopping 128bytes (Single-Sided).

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk

I only remember this because at the time I had seen these drives my wife was working for SORBUS as their parts department / in-house service tech. (hmm, I wonder how we met?)

Even more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

Yep. The place I was at with the VAX's had an IBM word processor that used those along with a daisy wheel printer.

 

[coffee]

Yep. First computer I worked on was an IBM 8088 with 2 5.25 floppy drives. We have come a long way alright. But we have fallen behind in other ways.

Security and privacy. We really need to get our act together on those. Also, There was a time when Microsoft was innovative. Not anymore. They are just treading water.

coffee

 

[allanc]

Actually just checked up it was dos 3.2. Optional extras that I couldn't afford were 10 or 20GB hard drives!

Isn't that 10 or 20 Mb?

 

[allanc]

Y'all seen the 8" floppy diskettes? Single-sided, I might add which held a whopping 128bytes (Single-Sided).

More info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_floppy_disk

I only remember this because at the time I had seen these drives my wife was working for SORBUS as their parts department / in-house service tech. (hmm, I wonder how we met?)

Even more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floppy_disk

I did some basic programming on a Radio Shack TRS-80 that had a 8" floppy diskette.
They were truly 'floppy'.
However, even the Rat Shack wasn't the first computer that I worked with.

 

[Martyn]

Isn't that 10 or 20 Mb?

Yes my mistake

 

[SilverLeaf]

Actually, I'm currently working on a really old one right now for a friend of mine. He's an older gentleman and a prolific author. His entire collection of writings are currently stored on a huge collection of 5-1/4" floppies. The machine is a late 80's-ish IBM clone with dual 5-1/4" drives, DOS 2.1, and a dead hard drive. This one has been a challenge.

• I had an old hard drive lying around that I thought I might be able to use, but I can't get the BIOS in the old machine to recognize the drive automatically. I can input the drive parameters manually (cylinders, heads, etc..) and the bios will see the drive, but freezes during post. I suspect the drive is just too modern for the old machine to handle.
• Fortunately, I have an old P4 system (my old bench machine) that still has a floppy controller. So, I was able to install one of the 5-1/4's in that machine. Booting to linux, I can read the data from the disks. But, the documents were created using an obscure DOS-based word processor (EasyWriter II), and I can't find anything modern that will open the documents correctly.
• The owner still happened to have the installation disks for the word processing software. So, I successfully installed FreeDOS on the P4, and then installed the word processor from the floppies. Everything seemed fine until I went to open a document . FreeDOS and the word processor don't play well together....memory management errors and such. I think I may be able to fix this though.

I've had to re-learn quite a few DOS commands while messing with this. It's amazing how it all comes back after a while. . Should my efforts fail, he does still have hard copies of his work that he has printed out over the years on his Epson impact printer.

 

[bertie40]

Ah, the joys of affording a 28.8 modem.

Nowadays, I get newsgroup downloads up to 16 MBps.... And I still get impatient.

 

[joydivision]

Times change, I think the biggest change is not hardware but social. Who could imagine even ten years ago sitting in a pub and posting pictures on facebook. Who could imagine watching TV online in 2000? When I was at university in 2002 we were told that internet TV would never happen as the bandwidth would be too expensive. By 2007 Iplayer was already thriving.

I am not sure I am ready for the next 5 years, I think things have become too portable and technology has started to interfere with our lives too much.

 

[Markverhyden]

Does anybody still have their slide rule? I still have mine from high school as well as my Dad's when he went to University.

 

[joydivision]

Well before my time, even when I was at primary school we had BBC computers and Acorn A3000s. We mostly had 486s in secondary school, all 486 DX2-66s connected to an ethernet network. Only the computers in the main computer room had internet access though.

 

[bertie40]

Really showing my age, I remember being at primary school in the early seventies, and they were just phasing out individual chalks and slates.

If we were really good, they let us move up from simple ink pens, which we dipped in ink wells, to fountain pens.

And, yes, we had abicii (the plural of abacus)