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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!
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
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.
Take the bus.
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.