Gadgets, Then & Now
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! "
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? --
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.