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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! "
A whole six items. *cough*
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
TFA isn't very deep, I was expecting an interesing and in-depth read.
As the old joke goes: Nostalgia just ain't what it used to be.
Don't you just hate it when people reply to your signature?
This article took all of what, 5 minutes using Google Image Search to throw together? Brilliant!
Making you think you're crazy is a billion dollar industry.
Thing is, as clunky as all that stuff was back in the day, the same some exists now, only in sleeker, more refined format. If you look especially how much a lot of stuff like phones and computers have shrunk in the last 20 years while increasing capacity, it's enough to make you believe that powerful, wearable and unobtrusive computers etc will be common within say 15 years. The hype we get over new products that disappoint is often enough to make you say "it's all crap", but comparatives like this is a reminder that real progress is made.
The downside is that techology seems to be getting more unreliable, from a user perspective.
I'm on my third PS2 right now, but my Atari 2600 (still fun!) works like new...
Someone--I think it was Robert Kuttner but can't find the reference--was trying to explain the "paradox" that all of the economic figures seem good, yet polls consistently show U. S. citizens are pessimistic about the economic future.
His belief is that the problem is that the official inflation figures contain a mixture of prices for things like consumer electronics gadgets, which have continuously decreased in price, and things like healthcare costs and college tuition, which have continuously increased in price at far faster rate than "the" inflation rate.
The problem is that things like healthcare and education are much more important ultimately than cellular phones that can show video.
He said that we are turning into "a tchotchke society," rich in frivolous gadgets but poor in literacy rates, infant mortality, etc.
I love my iPod, but I'm worried about my medical insurance.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
He said that we are turning into "a tchotchke society," rich in frivolous gadgets but poor in literacy rates, infant mortality, etc.
That's because we can get brown people in distant countries to make our gadgets for us on the cheap. We can't do the same for health care or education. If the economic worm turned and those people weren't willing to work for so little, we'd find ourselves not only health-care-less but gadget-less as well! We are rich in shit, cheap crap which relies on the world's have-nots to remain cheap. A scheme this unbalanced can only last for so long.
Freedom: "I won't!"
I've spend a bit of time on www.c64s.com lately, and found out that a lot of the games of the time really weren't worth the effort of loading in. Remember listening to 30 minutes of peeps and squicks to find out that you just loaded an amazingly crappy game? (luckily you got a cracked version from a copied tape for free anyway) The were some real quality games (Commando!!) with very cool sound etc, and the memory just biases to think that all games were better that time. Hell no!
By the way: did anyone ever manage to play Monty Mole with success? I never found out wath the goal was!!! Or Mission Impossible (with the buildings where you had to search lockers), I think I never finished that one
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
I used floppies more than I'll ever use flash.
That's not saying much. Might this be because there was no hard drive at the time? For a long time, that was the only affordable way to store software and operating systems. Now, files are stored on hard drives, and you can just transfer files over the network, so there's not as much need for a portable storage medium.
I'm thankful for the current media players, especially the compact portable ones. Radio is annoying as crap with ads and constantly recycled media, at least with portable media players, *I* can control what and when I can play the audio. The ability to record and distribute videos within a short time, low cost and low difficulties is nice too.
I'm thankful for duplexing laser printers. I'm sorry, while the dot matrix units were nice, they only printed one side, printed incredibly crude pictures and were loud. It's nice to get rid of fan-fold paper too.
Mail order was incredibly slow, now it is easier to find a certain item and pay for it and if you paid for it, you might see the item on the next business day.
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. Even if a supercomputer could give an answer immediately like a google search, they will still find things that will burn CPUs for days, weeks, months, or years.
Back then, when I pressed "record" on a tape recorder or the shutter button on a camera, it did what I wanted instantaneously.
None of this goddamn 2-second delay, or booting into the OS for 30 seconds to figure out how to record from the microphone.
Nowadays I am reluctant to buy any technology unless it does the basic things that technology used to do for me in the 1970s. There's no way I'd go back, of course, but I think one of the great failures of consumer electronics today is that much of it is incapable of basic features 30 years back---largely as a matter of priorities and crappy user interface design.
Xcott
...is the anachronisms you get in "near future" movies and TV shows of the recent past. I still smirk whenever I remember RoboCop walking through a room of reel-to-reel data storage machines before plugging himself into a crime database, or Misato calling NERV headquarters on a bulky corded car phone.
The thing about near-future cinema is they always spend more time thinking about the big technology changes than the little ones.
In the end of the 80s the most popular removable storage media was the 5 1/4 inch diskette, capable of storing 360 KB (later 1200 KB). If you compare that to a big compact flash card of today, you could store close to 25 000 diskettes on ONE 8GB CompactFlash card
At the end of the 80's, the most popular removable storage media was the 3.5" floppy. They actually came out in the early to mid 80's. They were also around a dollar each, as opposed to the $480 for the SanDisk 8GB CompactFlash.
Geez Louise! Talk about comparing apples to kumquats!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Hey, Big Macs are getting smaller too! Back when I was 8, I got more full from one than I do now.
Yeah, it's a near certainty that scientific computation will expand to fill the storage and CPU limits of current technology. The only constant is the patience of the computer operator... :)
Take the bus.
At a dollar each, it would cost you $25,000 to put that same 8GB on floppies - quite a bit more than $480! Never mind the inconvenience.
For storage that you can carry in your shirt pocket, this comparison would be spot-on if they had chosen 3.5" disks instead. It still shows pretty well how the convenience has increased and the price per MB has dropped dramatically.
You had me until you mentioned homeopathy. Homeopathy is pseudoscience, and has been thoroughly refuted. Any benefits that anyone claims to get from it is just a placebo effect.
"It's amazing, at least to me how fast computation has gotten, and how slow computation is still for scientists and engineers today. Even if a supercomputer could give an answer immediately like a google search, they will still find things that will burn CPUs for days, weeks, months, or years."
It's not so amazing if you remember that acceptable time delays in getting an answer don't change all that much in scientific computing. A bigger computer just means you can make your model more complete (ie closer to reality) and still have it run in a reasonable amount of time.
In weather forecasting, for example, model development goes hand in hand with computer upgrades. When you get that next best, top-of-the-heap computer, you can be sure that the new model will take about as much time to run on the new machine as the old one did on the old machine. However, the new model will take a lot more variables into account, and will be more accurate over a finer scale. The acceptable delays were set a long time ago, so now it's just a matter of cramming more into that time.
-HT
Yes, you're right. By the end of the 80s the 3.5"was the most popular disk by far. The Macintosh started that and then came machines like the Atari ST and the Commodore Amiga. By the end of the eighties quite a few magazines used to come with 640k disks on the front (should be enough for anyone ;-p) and even then we used to joke about the big old 5.25 disks. A couple of years on from this and the HD FD had taken over as being the disk of choice and we used to scoff at the then puny 640k disks (not enough for everyone :-p) etc etc
In fact, I've just thought, the first Apple superdrive was super because it could r/w to SD,DD and HD floppy formats. Sorry just thought of that . . . shows how the meaning of 'super' changes too.
TFA would have been better if they'd done any of the pictures to the same scale aswell.
PS: I'd like to see the Motorola RAZR put out 5W - the transportables could!
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Also having a floppy drive is more useful than having to incorporate driver disks onto a CD before installation of an operating system. There are times when having a floppy is handy - those people who say that to you with a straight face are probably just considering more factors than yourself.
I still have a system on site with a 5 1/4 inch floppy for the purposes of being able to read old disks as required.
As for the other point - it takes less time to plug a floppy in than it does to move a drive about or burn a CDROM that pretends it is a driver floppy disk.
Speaking as someone who looks after a lot of systems with neither floppy or CDROM drives the floppy disk is the one that is missed the most during setup.