This is sick

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SeilerBird

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 25, 2012
Posts
18,081
Location
St Cloud Florida USA
I needed a flash drive to store my 2000 most favorite songs of all time for use with my 7.2 channel surround sound system. So I ordered a 16 gigabyte flash drive from Amazon. It is the size of my fingernail. It weighs a third of an ounce with the protective cover. It costs $7.48. That is including free shipping. It will arrive in less than two days. And I will use less than half the 16 gigs to store my 2000 songs.

About twenty years ago I saw a 40 gigabyte hard drive for sale at Frys and I was totally amazed they could make something with that much storage. It was the size of a small microwave oven. I didn't ask the price since a half gig hard drive was obscene at that point. I had to drive 50 miles round trip to get to Frys. And it had only been 8 years since I got my first PC which came with a 20 megabyte hard drive that I thought I could never fill in my lifetime.

What is next? In 10 years a 200 terabyte hard drive will be the size of a grain of rice and will be given away in a box of CrackerJacks?
 
Yep...amazing. My first was an IBM clone with an 80286 processor with turbo mode that took it to 8 meg from normal 4 meg (overclocked). 40M hard-drive, partitioned to 20M segments since MS 3.0 (which was loaded from 5 1/2 inch floppy drive that was double density, single sided 320K) couldn't handle more than 20M. I had a 14 inch color monitor and an Epson dot-matrix wide carriage printer. Mouse support? Ha...no such thing as a mouse for IBM. Mice were for those artsy-fartsy Apple Macintosh wannabe computers ;) .
Now my f@#%ing phone is more powerful!
Tom, thanks for bringing up the old memories and pointing to how great some things are now-a-days.
Bob
 
Back in the late '70s, my TRS-80 initially came with a cassette tape drive for storage and 16K RAM. When I was able to get the expansion interface with an additional 32K RAM (48K total for the user) and a floppy drive (5 1/4"), double sided with 90K storage on each side, I was in hog heaven.

A friend also had a TRS-80, and we were having a discussion one day in my kitchen, about the possible future of computing. We speculated that one day we'd have a full color screen with pretty decent graphics (way beyond the Apple of that day), rather than the monochrome 64 characters by 16 lines of text and a 128 x 48 pixel graphics. My wife refused to believe that could happen. In 1985 the Amiga came out and, of course, today's capabilities are well beyond what we imagined back then.
 
I believe the only reason they still make consumer desktop systems is so old farts like me can see the screen. I have a smart phone but can barely make out some pictures and forget about reading something I look up on Google

Thanks Tom and welcome back
 
You had a hard drive? That's too cool.

I still have my original XT in the basement, just couldn't bring my self to toss it. We'll have to power it up one of these days and see what happens.
 
A few years ago I was cleaning out our storage shed and found a replacement hard drive left over from my early years as a field service engineer for a computer aided design/drafting system company. The drive was a Western Digital 10MB (yes, MegaByte) full height drive still in the original sealed box. The MSRP on the box was $1,295.00!
 
I remember buying USED full size and half height HD's for a buck a megabyte... But then I go all the way back to SSDD FLoppies. and in fact gave away a bunch of 8" floppies to a company that still had a computer that used them.

I just upgraded the memory in my Smart phone.. This is a MICROSD card  you could put at least six of them on top of a postage stamp and still have stamp showing.. 64 GIGS 48 bucks (The package it was in said 48 Gigs but the phone says 64)  I just upgraded the memory in this laptop.. 8 GIGS 60 bucks (you know, the micro SD is cheaper) at Crucial .com  Laptop was 2 gig last week.. Much faster now.

Oh, intersting side note: Phone and the 64Gig card are both Samsungs.. SO IS THE Original 2 gig card in this Toshiba.. (I moved it to slot 2 putting the larger Crucial card in slot 1)  Laptop seems very happy.

When it comes to external drives... I think I have two 500 Gig drives here plus the one in this laptop.. all laptop size drives (fit in your pocket)  All under 100 apeace.


It is supposed to be a curse: May you live in interesting times... Truly, we have been so cursed.
 
I got started on an IBM 5110 in 1979. It had 32 kb of internal memory and two 8", 1.2 mb floppy disk drives. It came with a crude version of Basic built in.

It also had APL, which was a rather powerful language. It used a strange set of symbols which were on a secondary mode of the keyboard. Ir was possible to write useable (though not really useful) programs in a single line of code. APL programmers delighted in giving these one liners to other APL programmers with the challenge "I bet you can't figure out what this does".

Joel
 
In 1976 I was an IT manager in an IBM internal computing center.  Our main frame computer was a $13M  IBM-3168 (their biggest and best at the time).  The maximum memory available in this model was 1 meg.  The only option to increase memory was to either purchase an update feature called the Multi-Processor (MP) feature, or the Attached Processor (AP) feature, either feature added an additional processor and a second 1meg memory frame.

We installed the AP feature at a cost of $3,000,000 (internal Co. cost) and a cool $1,000,000 (real money outlay) to retrofit our 5K sq.ft. computer room.  (Extra raised floor space, air conditioning and chilled water controllers for electronic cooling were required.)

BTW - we didn't have the software to run the additional processor, so it remained turned off.  We just used the memory.    $1M for 1meg of memory.  What a bargain.
 
in 1968 my first 'storage device' was a punched card.  I was responsible for maintaining a program that required 18 boxes of punched cards.  Approximatly 36,000 cards.  Yup, things have changed.  Too bad other technologies haven't kept up.  If they did we'd surely have our flying cars by now.

To the OP:
You may be required to change the default formatting on the thumb drive.  Most common for media devices is FAT32.  You may have to put all the music in the root directory and give up such things as playlists, shuffle etc.  depends on your sound system.  That's why I still have a couple of working iPods.

 
8Muddypaws said:
You may be required to change the default formatting on the thumb drive.  Most common for media devices is FAT32.  You may have to put all the music in the root directory and give up such things as playlists, shuffle etc.  depends on your sound system.  That's why I still have a couple of working iPods.
They don't mention the formatting in the user manual. I have a similar thumb drive in my car plugged into the sound system and it works just fine. But if nothing else I can use Bluetooth to stream from my iPhone. I don't have any playlists. I just set it to shuffle and I am happy. Thanks for the tip Muddy.
 
Both my radio and my home theater system require FAT32, but newer equipment might understand more formats.  That's a good thing.

More often than not thumb drives come preformatted FAT or FAT32 but I've seen a few formatted NTFS or whatever.

I have all my media (excluding photographs) on a 500GB G-Connect media drive.  It's a wireless hotspot, external drive, wireless media server, and network backup for our Apple devices.  All for $39.  I haven't tried it yet but I'm pretty sure I can log my iPhone onto it's wireless media server, link the iPhone to my radio via Bluetooth, and have my whole 70GB collection at my disposal.  The UI is kind of clunky but once you get used to it it's OK.  Fry's Electronics still has them.
 
When I was at the bank, we had an offsite, 5000 sf building down the street for our IT department. It had the false floor, white room, and the big tape drives. We kept the records of 20,000 dda (checking) accounts, CDs, loans, savings, personnel, payroll and printed customer's statements, stuffed them in envelopes, and mailed them. All in house.

Today, I could run the entire bank operation from the PC sitting on my desk at home. Still all in house!  ;D
 
My first job out of college (1984) was with Burroughs (now Unisys).  I was responsible for inventory management of the B2x product line.  It was Burroughs' first foray into "PC" type machines.  The original machines were dual floppy units - with an "external hard drive" option that got you a 10MB hard drive for $500.  Today - with terabyte drives available for $50-$60 - I can't help but marvel at how far and how fast the technology has come since its early days!
 
The last 50 years have been quite amazing regarding the pace of technology. I remember seeing a promo video on the first Univac, it filled a large room and had huge cooling fans. The presenter told us our pocket calculators would do everything that monster could and this was in the mid 80's. It's all well and good but I wish they would strengthen the foundation before adding more stories, my computer gives me grief with the simplest tasks.
 
Larry N. said:
Back in the late '70s, my TRS-80 initially came with a cassette tape drive for storage and 16K RAM. When I was able to get the expansion interface with an additional 32K RAM (48K total for the user) and a floppy drive (5 1/4"), double sided with 90K storage on each side, I was in hog heaven.

A friend also had a TRS-80, and we were having a discussion one day in my kitchen, about the possible future of computing. We speculated that one day we'd have a full color screen with pretty decent graphics (way beyond the Apple of that day), rather than the monochrome 64 characters by 16 lines of text and a 128 x 48 pixel graphics. My wife refused to believe that could happen. In 1985 the Amiga came out and, of course, today's capabilities are well beyond what we imagined back then.
Larry my ex-BIL was the engineer behind the Z-80 and the co-founder of Zilog. I got to see the Z-80 when it was in it's bread board stage. He just died last month of Parkinson's. We used to go to the Colorado River and water ski together.

http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/sfgate/obituary.aspx?pid=175018637
 
The first computer I was involved with (on the periphery) used a rotating magnetic drum for storage. Folks in another department had the excirement of working with an all-tube computer. Tube chages reportedly occurred every 2 hours.

Subsequently spending 30 years in the "chip industry" gave me a first hand appreciation of the rate of techology changes.
 
SeilerBird said:
Larry my ex-BIL was the engineer behind the Z-80 and the co-founder of Zilog. I got to see the Z-80 when it was in it's bread board stage. He just died last month of Parkinson's. We used to go to the Colorado River and water ski together.
Wow amazing--and a shame that he just passed on.

It is interesting that the Z80 was developed for embedded systems (advanced cash registers, etc.). They didn't realize when they were developing it how important it would end up being for many of the computers that would begin the personal computer revolution.



Mike
 
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