Sure hope to see you at the SPSP.
I need to reposition the aerial on the dish. I miscalculated the focus because the original mount had been modified. When I put it in the right place (about an hr's work) I will hook up the LNA and Spec. analyser and have a look at the sun. This being successful the project will be turned over to the radio astronomers.
I remember the old Byte mag. and the Apples. By the time the Apple 11 came along I was the section "Guru" on the old IBM XT. Programming it with Symphony, Lotus 123, Multimate, ACAD 2 and Dataflex. These were all used when "work was slack. I had an outboard 70 MB drive and some hidden partitions that the IT managers did not ever find. I used the "FF" character in the directory address.
Fantastic input into the thread Gary, I feel older though for the tirp down memory lane. In stark contrast, I remember how cutting edge all these magazines and their articles was at the time, and also how you felt like you were an alien becuase you played with this stuff and heaven forbid, actually understood it. It amazes me how the basics of computing havnt changed a great deal since these days either.
Fantastic input into the thread Gary, I feel older though for the tirp down memory lane. In stark contrast, I remember how cutting edge all these magazines and their articles was at the time, and also how you felt like you were an alien becuase you played with this stuff and heaven forbid, actually understood it. It amazes me how the basics of computing havnt changed a great deal since these days either.
That works out at US$0.0296 a byte (i.e. approximately 3 cents a byte).
Many IceInSpace readers will have 4GB or more of DRAM loaded in their machines
these days.
It is therefore interesting to reflect how much 4GB of memory would have cost
in late 1977 if one had purchased it in the same form as appeared in the
advertisement.
Firstly, it would equate to 262,144 of those memory cards and would have cost
in excess of a staggering US$127.1 million dollars.
The 1977 board is quoted as consuming 5 watts. 262,144 boards would have consumed 1.31 Megawatts.
If one was willing to pay proportionally more for access speed, so for example,
one was prepared to pay twice as much for DRAM's twice as fast and so on,
then a modest speed DRAM today would be at least 35 times faster than its
1977 counterpart on a random access (in reality, the 2011 part achieves
considerably higher transfer rates than this when used in a typical application),
which would further inflate the US$127.1 million dollar figure to US$4.45 billion.
By comparison, in 1977, Cray Research's first customer paid only US$8.86 million for
their Cray 1 supercomputer which had a 80MHz clock speed but with a vector architecture.
The increases in performance and the phenomenal decreases in price of
computing in a space of only 34 years seem staggering, but when one considers
that this trend is projected to continue for some time, it is positively mind boggling
to say the least what the future holds.
It is therefore interesting to reflect how much 4GB of memory would have cost
in late 1977 if one had purchased it in the same form as appeared in the
advertisement.
Firstly, it would equate to 262,144 of those memory cards and would have cost
in excess of a staggering US$127.1 million dollars.
By comparison, in 1977, Cray Research's first customer paid only US$8.86 million for
their Cray 1 supercomputer which had a 80MHz clock speed but with a vector architecture.
The increases in performance and the phenomenal decreases in price of
computing in a space of only 34 years seem staggering, but when one considers
that this trend is projected to continue for some time, it is positively mind boggling
to say the least what the future holds.
It was only 2 years ago I first heard about a 'Terrabyte' and thought "no way, nothing is that's huge!".
And yet here I am, those 2 years later, casually saving my images onto a $89 1.5 Terrabyte hard drive here at home, non plussed
LOL Ken!
And just think, It won't be very long until we think of a current day PC with i9 CPU and its 8GB ram and it's 2TB HDD the same way that we currently think of an XT clone with its 2MHz i8086 CPU and it's 10MB HDD
World disk storage figures enough to make the head spin too
Quote:
Originally Posted by ballaratdragons
It was only 2 years ago I first heard about a 'Terrabyte' and thought "no way, nothing is that's huge!".
And yet here I am, those 2 years later, casually saving my images onto a $89 1.5 Terrabyte hard drive here at home, non plussed
Hi Ken,
The rapid pace of hard disk storage will continue to introduce us to SI prefixes
that few of us would have had call to use in conversation otherwise.
According to an IDC report of May 2010, the world's digital storage capacity was
expected to reach 1.2 zettabytes during 2010.
A zettabyte is 10 to the power of 21 bytes and is equivalent to a million petabytes.
A petabyte is equivalent to a million gigabytes or one thousand terabytes.
Therefore the entire world's disk storage as at some point in 2010 would have been
equivalent to the capacity of 800 million of the 1.5TB drives you own.
If stored on 3.5" floppy disks, one would have to go out and buy
600,000,000,000,000 of them.
According to IDC, between 2009 and 2020, the world's data storage capacity
is anticipated to grow 44-fold. In other words, equivalent to the capacity of 35.2 billion
1.5 TB drives. If the data were stored on DVD's, IDC claim the stack would reach
half way between Earth and Mars.
Storing this much data is one technical challenge but moving it around
networks when it is needed is another. In March 2010, AT&T reported that
nearly 19 petabytes (i.e. 19,000 terabytes) of data traffic moves across just
their own network backbone on a typical business day.
Ok .. very cool, Doug … what vintage is it ? Did you build it yourself ?
Cheers
No this was Parker bro's answer to tv PONG in the late 70's early 80's. They use Vector graphics (X,Y) It was the only console ever released with it's own dedicated monitor & vector graphics. Worth big bucks now to collectors.
No this was Parker bro's answer to tv PONG in the late 70's early 80's. They use Vector graphics (X,Y) It was the only console ever released with it's own dedicated monitor & vector graphics. Worth big bucks now to collectors.
Terrific, Doug .. spent many an hour playing 'Asteroids', on what I guess was a similar platform.
Hang onto it !
.. And 'good onya' for keeping it in such good condition !
I got something better a "VECTRICS" still working with all games & an extra controller. I had an offer for a free holiday in Japan for it, I declined.
WOW Doug!
A friend of mine had one of those, spent many hours playing Asteroids!
Do you still have the coloured acetate sheets that were supposed to be placed over the screen?
WOW Doug!
A friend of mine had one of those, spent many hours playing Asteroids!
Do you still have the coloured acetate sheets that were supposed to be placed over the screen?
How much would 4GB of DRAM cost in 1977?
