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Gadgets, Then & Now

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the weekend-nostalgia dept.

An anonymous reader writes in to tell us about "A funny article about gadgets from the 70's & 80's compared to gadgets of today. Amazing that you can fit 25,000 5 1/4 diskettes on one 8GB compact flash, and phones weighed 11.5 pounds! "

5 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. Re:"The tchotchke society" by Raleel · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&n ame=ViewWeb&articleId=11367 might be it

    The Tchotchke Economy

    --
    -- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
  2. Re:Wow, what a great comparison of 70s-80s vs now by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 2, Informative

    "Tha cancer cure rate hasn't changed since the 60s. We can detect it earlier. Actually that's also true if you compare it to 1902."

    Incorrect, cancer cure and survival rates have gotten better since the 1960s.

  3. Re:Holy Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Batman! by woolio · · Score: 3, Informative

    Remember when computers looked like this?

    For those that don't know, "computer" used to be a job description. They were typically women that did parallel processing and redundant calculations by hand for places like NASA and the government.

    Its amazing, at least to me how fast computation has gotten, and how slow computation is still for scientists and engineers today. ...

    I think part of that is these "scientists" salivate too much on how many nodes they can build and don't give much thought into making their algorithms more efficient, lower complexity, etc, etc....

    They are still using parallel processing to do REDUNDANT calculations... Just like the old days.

  4. Re:And yet, amazingly... by dbIII · · Score: 2, Informative
    You haven't given any reasons why.
    In very simple terms - floppy disks are still useful because people still use them. If you don't like the reasons (eg. firmware updates, BIOS updates, driver disks, virus definitions, virus fix, restore disk, boot floppies, sneakernet) or they are outside the realm of your experience it does not mean that other people are not using them occasionally.
  5. Re:"The tchotchke society" by Politburo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Food and energy is not removed from the CPI. However, most news articles and economic columns, etc, these days look at 'core-CPI' to estimate inflation. 'Core-CPI' is the CPI minus food and energy. If you go here, you'll see that "all items" is the top choice, with "all, less food and energy" underneath.