[LINK] In the old days ... [was: Link archives]

[Rick Welykochy]

--- Craig Sanders <cas at taz.net.au> wrote:

> (i can remember paying nearly $2000 for the very first hard disk i owned
> myself, a 20MB drive, back in the early 1980s. it cost me about the same
> as the computer itself did a year or two before that. my new 300GB drive
> is 15000 times the capacity for less than 1/13th the price. and $2000
> was worth a lot more back then that it is now).

That brings back memories of my first spend on RAM. $800 for 2 MB
of RAM for ar early PC, mid 1980's. And around that time I felt very gratified
to have a 20 MB hard ram with the 2 MB of ram on my puny little PC.
(But programming in an "EXT MEM" or the other vile memory mapper was 
completely and utterly brain damaging on the PC. Especially when I knew
that *nix and DEC boxes ran fine with a flat 32-bit address space.)

Back in 1984 I spent about $2500 for one of the first Macintoshes, i.e. the
stand-alone floppy-only self-contained box. Put legs on it and it could have
been one of the robots in Silent Running. My latest Mac is a quite powerful and
wonderfully convenient Mac-mini, purchased with all the add-ons (incl. 1 GB RAM)
for less than half that price.

And I am still amazed by the track record of my uni's old IBM 360 (and subsequent
Amdahl 370) that multitasked over 550 sumultaneous terminal connections as well
as ran Dept of Physics and Chemistry simulations in the background. All using one
CPU, 8 MB of core memory and drum (not disk) for swapping. The disk units for the
thing looked like washing machines and were famous for marching across the machine
room floor when overtaxed. Think platters you could eat off.

And you tell that to the kids of today and they don't believe ya!

cheers
rickw


		
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