Amazing Computers

[Jogeephus]

I had to make some changes with my computer system. In need of upgrading because the drive was about full but changing over to a new 64 bit system would create some other problems but leaving it as is was going to cause more problems. Instead, I put two terabytes of memory in the computer and what once was a nearly full hard drive on the disc map now looks like a tiny boat sitting in the middle of the pacific ocean.

I think back to the punch cards and the two floppy drive computers and just shake my head. I'll always remember my first 5 meg hard drive and how I just knew I could never fill this up. Now two terabytes. Freaking mind boggling. I can't even imagine where we will be in another 20 years.

 

[cross_7]

I had to make some changes with my computer system. In need of upgrading because the drive was about full but changing over to a new 64 bit system would create some other problems but leaving it as is was going to cause more problems. Instead, I put two terabytes of memory in the computer and what once was a nearly full hard drive on the disc map now looks like a tiny boat sitting in the middle of the pacific ocean.

I think back to the punch cards and the two floppy drive computers and just shake my head. I'll always remember my first 5 meg hard drive and how I just knew I could never fill this up. Now two terabytes. Freaking mind boggling. I can't even imagine where we will be in another 20 years.

So you know what old men and old computers have in common

 

[greybeard]

I had to make some changes with my computer system. In need of upgrading because the drive was about full but changing over to a new 64 bit system would create some other problems but leaving it as is was going to cause more problems. Instead, I put two terabytes of memory in the computer and what once was a nearly full hard drive on the disc map now looks like a tiny boat sitting in the middle of the pacific ocean.

I don't get it. Swap filing?

 

[hillbilly beef man]

We will probally not have to worry about memory any more. Things are going the way of cloud computing very quickly. The only thing that worries me is what happens when the cloud goes poof!

 

[lavacarancher]

Jogee, I'm probably a little older than you and have been in "electronics" since I was 14. I remember the company I worked for got a new hard drive - a 5mb, 14" platter hard drive. And we thought we were hot shyt. Two years later 5mb could be had in a 5 1/4 size. Before the 14" hard drive we had a drum storage device which was about 30" tall and the cabinet was about 24" square. The rotating drum mass was 85 pounds and took about 2 minutes to spin up and several more minutes to spin down. Oh, and it was only 1mb capacity. You had to re-write everything each and every time you read something, otherwise after a few read cycles the information just disappeared into bit never-never land.

Do you remember the first handheld calculator? I think I still have mine in a box in my closet next to my slide rule.

 

[Jogeephus]

I remember the slide rule but was just behind ever having to use one. Remember when Texas Instruments put out some hand calculators but they were so expensive.

I have some stuff on the cloud but for what I do manipulating data via the cloud is slow even though I'm only 200 feet from a trunk line and having to wait a second or two to bring the stored data too me seems like a lifetime. I guess I'm spoiled. What I ended up doing is making a mini-cloud with redundancy in my system. Each Friday at 2:00 a.m the system copies everything to another bank of memory on site and this can then be sent to the cloud for safety but I can have the data on the screen with just a click of the mouse. Looking at the amount of storage I now have makes me think there is little chance I'll ever fill this up but I think I thought this before. :lol2:

 

[dun]

The first "high powered" system I worked on was a Burroughs B263. Everything was done with cards.The 263 K of memory was all core and took up an area 4x4x6 (feet not inches). That was Burrughs version of the IBM 1401 G. When I quit working for an Army project that much storage was on a removable chip in spot the size of a thumbtack head.

 

[Jogeephus]

Its amazing how far we have come. I remember a cool room that was about 2 acres in size and am told today a phone has the same capacity as that monster did.

 

[melking]

I heard somewhere that the average digital watch has as much computing power as the moon mission did.

 

[dun]

I heard somewhere that the average digital watch has as much computing power as the moon mission did.

I don;t doubt it since the moon computers were basicly the equivilent of the one that was used for "pong"

 

[greybeard]

The first "high powered" system I worked on was a Burroughs B263. Everything was done with cards.The 263 K of memory was all core and took up an area 4x4x6 (feet not inches). That was Burrughs version of the IBM 1401 G. When I quit working for an Army project that much storage was on a removable chip in spot the size of a thumbtack head.

The first "automatic" lathe I ever worked with used punch cards--others used tapes. NC instead of CNC.
In the early 80s I went to a big oilfield auction and saw dozens of big mills and lathes, still in perfect working order on the auction block and they all sold to overseas buyers or sold for scrap prices as CNC took over the job of G coding. Big machines, threaded full joints of drill pipe and big casing. Same sale had pallets of those special "typewriters" that punched the paper tapes and cards. Boxes and boxes of blank cards.

I ran both a CNC saw and a CNC point to point machining center from 1999-2006. Writing G code became easy, but you still had to zero out--"tell" the machine where the edges and top of the blanks were. Saw and caused some pretty good wrecks when leaving out a - on the code.
Now the machines have optical scanners that do all that for ya.

The TI-30 and 31 were the standard when I was going to Gas Turbine school. A couple of people had a TI 50---$150 a pop!!
Now you can buy a decent graphing calculator for under $100.

 

[greybeard]

I figured Dun started off with an abacus.. :compute:

 

[TexasBred]

Its amazing how far we have come. I remember a cool room that was about 2 acres in size and am told today a phone has the same capacity as that monster did.

Appears we've moved forward a bit from my daughter's little Commodore 64kb computer. That "terabyte" is probably a bit more than a Brazilian. :lol2:

 

[dun]

Its amazing how far we have come. I remember a cool room that was about 2 acres in size and am told today a phone has the same capacity as that monster did.

Appears we've moved forward a bit from my daughter's little Commodore 64kb computer. That "terabyte" is probably a bit more than a Brazilian. :lol2:

I had a whiz kid working for me once that took 3 commodore 64s and hooked them together and hooked them up to a cassette tape. For it's time that thing was blazing fast and convenient for his home use.

 

[shaz]

Jogee, I'm probably a little older than you and have been in "electronics" since I was 14. I remember the company I worked for got a new hard drive - a 5mb, 14" platter hard drive. And we thought we were hot shyt. Two years later 5mb could be had in a 5 1/4 size. Before the 14" hard drive we had a drum storage device which was about 30" tall and the cabinet was about 24" square. The rotating drum mass was 85 pounds and took about 2 minutes to spin up and several more minutes to spin down. Oh, and it was only 1mb capacity. You had to re-write everything each and every time you read something, otherwise after a few read cycles the information just disappeared into bit never-never land.

Do you remember the first handheld calculator? I think I still have mine in a box in my closet next to my slide rule.

Digital Equipment Corp?
I've worked on that stuff before and I'm 45.

 

[dun]

Jogee, I'm probably a little older than you and have been in "electronics" since I was 14. I remember the company I worked for got a new hard drive - a 5mb, 14" platter hard drive. And we thought we were hot shyt. Two years later 5mb could be had in a 5 1/4 size. Before the 14" hard drive we had a drum storage device which was about 30" tall and the cabinet was about 24" square. The rotating drum mass was 85 pounds and took about 2 minutes to spin up and several more minutes to spin down. Oh, and it was only 1mb capacity. You had to re-write everything each and every time you read something, otherwise after a few read cycles the information just disappeared into bit never-never land.

Do you remember the first handheld calculator? I think I still have mine in a box in my closet next to my slide rule.

Digital Equipment Corp?
I've worked on that stuff before and I'm 45.

The first PCs I worked with were DEC. I really liked them far better then the Xerox PCs or apple.

 

[Caustic Burno]

I had to make some changes with my computer system. In need of upgrading because the drive was about full but changing over to a new 64 bit system would create some other problems but leaving it as is was going to cause more problems. Instead, I put two terabytes of memory in the computer and what once was a nearly full hard drive on the disc map now looks like a tiny boat sitting in the middle of the pacific ocean.

I think back to the punch cards and the two floppy drive computers and just shake my head. I'll always remember my first 5 meg hard drive and how I just knew I could never fill this up. Now two terabytes. Freaking mind boggling. I can't even imagine where we will be in another 20 years.

I am hating mine right now a few more night's like tonight and I am throwing it in the stock tank and getting another one.

 

[lavacarancher]

The first "computer" I ever worked on was made by Univac and was used in the Mercury program at NASA. The next civilian computer I ever saw was a Raytheon 703 which had 64K of core memory. All the "chips" plugged in to sockets from the bottom. We sold a system to the Argentine national oil company and when I went down to do the installation and acceptance, all the chips were laying in the bottom of the cabinet. Back then most control systems depended on "tuning" the propagation delays of certain chips so even though you got a 2-input NAND chip into the right place the computer may still not work because the prop delay wasn't right. We have certainly come a long way since those days.

Oh yea, the DEC entry into the world of PC's was called a Rainbow. I think IBM finally captured the business PC market because they introduced business software packages to go along with the hardware. It was tough back then for software developers because if you developed code to run on an IBM it may (or may not) run on a DEC or TI or, even later, a COMPAQ machine. That meant that code had to be developed on the same machine as the target. Crazy.

 

[dun]

The first "computer" I ever worked on was made by Univac and was used in the Mercury program at NASA. The next civilian computer I ever saw was a Raytheon 703 which had 64K of core memory. All the "chips" plugged in to sockets from the bottom. We sold a system to the Argentine national oil company and when I went down to do the installation and acceptance, all the chips were laying in the bottom of the cabinet. Back then most control systems depended on "tuning" the propagation delays of certain chips so even though you got a 2-input NAND chip into the right place the computer may still not work because the prop delay wasn't right. We have certainly come a long way since those days.

Oh yea, the DEC entry into the world of PC's was called a Rainbow. I think IBM finally captured the business PC market because they introduced business software packages to go along with the hardware. It was tough back then for software developers because if you developed code to run on an IBM it may (or may not) run on a DEC or TI or, even later, a COMPAQ machine. That meant that code had to be developed on the same machine as the target. Crazy.

The place where we had the Rainbows was real big into DEC. A few PDPs but mostly VAXs.
That was after being a rogramming facility for a bunch of airfarce Burroughs boxes. We would write the code and debug it on our system then mail it the other places and they would end back coredumps so we could patch the code to work on their systems.

 

[CKC1586]

The first "high powered" system I worked on was a Burroughs B263. Everything was done with cards.The 263 K of memory was all core and took up an area 4x4x6 (feet not inches). That was Burrughs version of the IBM 1401 G. When I quit working for an Army project that much storage was on a removable chip in spot the size of a thumbtack head.

Impressive..... Tech stuff :? and me :roll: bad mixture. Wish my retirement package included IT support for life.