MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
On 14 Sept 1956, IBM announced the 305 RAMAC computer, the first computer with a moving head hard disk and one of the last with vacuum tube technology. Capapble of storing 5 MBytes of data, the computer itself needed 30ft x 15 ft of space and the disk system another 16 sq ft. It weighed around a ton. /geek mode off
*** me that's a lot of memory (former ZX81 owner)
It's insane how far we've come, isn't it. I bought my first PC maybe 20 years ago and was amazed to have a 245MB hard drive in it. Today you can get a thousand times that storage on a card the size of your fingernail.
I bought my first PC maybe 20 years ago and was amazed to have a 245MB hard drive in it.
I'm pretty sure that the first harddrive we had (in an Apricot PC) was closer to 20Mb but then I remember having to store stuff on audio tape (like Cynic-al we had a ZX81) as was blown away by floppy disks (I think they held 100K).
I've 128[b]GB[/b] on a fingernail sized micro-sd card in the GoPro Session sat on the desk in front of me and harddrives are bought in terrabytes!
Wonder how much data center storage you can fit in 16sqft these days?
Must be measured in exabytes!
ZX Spectrum owners - remember all those happy hours of typing lines and lines and lines of code from the magazines?
ZX Spectrum owners – remember all those happy hours of typing lines and lines and lines of code from the magazines?
Yup. Then playing the game for five minutes, discovering it was crap and turning it off.
Thought there was a missing D and it was a thread celebrating the R6 early afternoon slot.
Anywho, I remember discovering that my 2010 iPhone 4 specs exceeded those of my 2000 iMac; the weight comparison being under 5 ounces to almost 35 pounds.
I had a Sequential Circuits Prophet 2000 sampling keyboard. 512K memory got frazzled by a voltage spike in a thunderstorm. £400 to replace the memory.
My first Mac had (I think) a 512K of RAM with a floppy drive and a Quisk 20Mb external drive. So long ago and so many many Macs since.
A 5Mb drive being delivered in 1956:
The first IBM disk drives I worked with were the 2311s - A whole 7.5Mb per drive
^ Always think of Joe 90 when I see pictures like that. 🙂
The front control panel was covered with a grid of lights. We'd while away the night shifts by pulling some of them out then flipping the "test all lights" lever to spell out smutty words.
Oh how the long nights just flew by....