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Author Topic: Another Memory Breakthrough  (Read 11053 times)

wolfnowl

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #20 on: November 03, 2007, 01:11:12 am »

Okay, should we begin discussing the history of UNIX now?  Things like the 'ETC'
 directory makes for some interesting reading...  That was around 1965 or so IIRC...

Mike.
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If your mind is attuned t

sniper

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #21 on: November 03, 2007, 11:34:32 am »

I still have a vic 20 knocking around somewhere, anybody got CS3 on a tape I can borrow......   Wayne
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MikeMike

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #22 on: November 03, 2007, 02:50:02 pm »

Just image 50 years from now... we'll be talking about how a 500g drive was 200$ and the size of our hand!

Michael
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cgf

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #23 on: November 03, 2007, 08:53:40 pm »

Quote
Actually, my own first computer was a Commodore 64 with no hard drive at all, only an external floppy drive. It was very hard to backup one floppy to another, because you had to keep swapping diskettes back and forth, and the drive would usually overheat before the copy was complete.   
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I could only dream of owning a C-64... I had the Commodore 16, 16kb of ram, no hard drive, data was stored on an external audio-cassette drive.

Funny thing is that most of the Basic 3.5 (version?) that I learnt back then will still work in modern software - eg writing macros in ms-excel these days.
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larsrc

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #24 on: November 04, 2007, 05:50:35 am »

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But hard drives keep getting bigger and cheaper, too. 750GB SATA's are only a few hundred dollars. By the end of next year 2 Terabyte arrays will probably be in the neighborhood of $500. And 500GB laptop disks won't be far behind. I think solid state memory will continue to be much more costly than disk storage for quite some time to come. So it'll be used where power consumption is key, and disks still used in most other scenarios.

Do you NEED that much in a laptop?  Well, it wasn't too long ago we thought 640MB of RAM was plenty.
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"Rotating" hard drives are not getting bigger or cheaper at the same rate as the solid state ones.  SS drives also have the advantage of being *much* faster -- we did some tests with the database at work (state library in Denmark), and the difference in speed on database queries was about an order of magnitude.  While rotating hard drives can still hold their own in sustained throughput, typical usage is much more scattered, and the seektime (in *milliseconds*) is killing them.  SS is the wave of the future, and was so even before these recent breakthroughs.

Power consumption and concomitant cooling are major costs in data centers these days.  Being able to pay more upfront to get faster and less power-consuming storage is very appealing.  Not to mention the lack of mechanical parts.  If I had money to invest right now, SS drive manufacturers would be high on my list (modulo the recent SanDisk lawsuit).

-Lars
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John S C

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #25 on: November 04, 2007, 10:14:07 am »

Can't do as good as Eric , but my first computer was a BBC mod 2 with 32K of memory, and a 100K external  floppy drive.

Bought it to teach myself to programme, most of which is now long forgotten. However it did make you keep your hard drive tidy, a habit which is still with me.

John C
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Coot

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #26 on: November 06, 2007, 07:46:33 pm »

I seem to remember Ohara plugging SS memory of some kind into the "dashboard thingy" on the Enterprise bridge back in the 60's.

My first computer was a Vector Graphic circa 1978. 32k ram and nothing graphic about it. Was followed by an Apple Lisa (yes, the $10,000 one  ). Being a graphic designer with a computer was cutting edge in 1982. Many Macs have followed. Now when I tell people I once had an Apple Lisa they think I'm talking about the horse-- Appaloosa.
« Last Edit: November 06, 2007, 07:58:50 pm by Coot »
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fennario

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #27 on: November 06, 2007, 08:20:50 pm »

Perhaps one day I'll open up a museum utilizing the contents of my closet of obsolescence... some notable residents include:

Apple IIe
TRS-80
Commodore c64
Apple IIgs
Macintosh SE30 which was modded to operate an external color display (w/ 8 bit color!!)
Various drives of varying formats 5 1/4 floppy, 3.5 floppy, zip, cd-rom, etc.
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Jonathan Wienke

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #28 on: November 11, 2007, 07:44:09 am »

Quote
I still have a vic 20 knocking around somewhere, anybody got CS3 on a tape I can borrow......

My first computer was also a Commodore VIC-20, with a cassette tape drive. I used to annoy my sister by taking cassettes I'd saved programs on and playing them in the stereo system. Then I upgraded to Commodore 128 (which I still have in storage). The 486 with 8MB of RAM was such a HUGE upgrade, I was amazed...
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DiaAzul

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Another Memory Breakthrough
« Reply #29 on: November 11, 2007, 10:09:27 am »

Quote
I seem to remember Ohara plugging SS memory of some kind into the "dashboard thingy" on the Enterprise bridge back in the 60's.

My first computer was a Vector Graphic circa 1978. 32k ram and nothing graphic about it. Was followed by an Apple Lisa (yes, the $10,000 one  ). Being a graphic designer with a computer was cutting edge in 1982. Many Macs have followed. Now when I tell people I once had an Apple Lisa they think I'm talking about the horse-- Appaloosa.
[a href=\"index.php?act=findpost&pid=151004\"][{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

Dang, that trumps my original Mac with single floppy,black and white screen, and all-in-one design, at a time that MacPaint was the 'wow' program. Though my first dream computers (i.e. the ones I wanted but couldn't afford at the time) were either a Sinclair MK-14 or an Acorn-65 (with a massive 256 bytes of RAM and 8 character LED calculator display and hexidecimal key pad). Guess things have moved on somewhat.
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David Plummer    http://photo.tanzo.org/
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