Technology old and new

Yorky

Yorky

RIP 21/01/2024
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Mod edit. This and following few posts moved from general chat thread to form new topic.

12 years ago I bought a 512 kb memory stick for my computer. It cost £44.00.

Today, I bought a 1 troglabyte external disc drive for my computer. It cost £36.00.

[Edit:

1 tb s.jpg
 
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In the 60's Dad worked for the City when they implemented their first computerized billing system. The computer took up an entire floor in City Hall. It was as cold as a meat locker. That massive machine had 4k RAM. In the mid 80's I was stationed in New Orleans. USN My job title was DP - Data Processing Technician. Late shift. Loading stacks of punched cards, paper tapes, mag reels and disk packs to run scheduled jobs on the main frame. Wearing coat, gloves and scarf. I requested and received a transfer to another department. Desk tops were being introduced in offices on a large scale. The Navy had just upgraded from CMOS to DOS. DOS was not yet a compatible OS between manufacturers. Zenith had the contract to provide desk tops to government agencies so their machines ran ZDOS. IBM had IBMDOS and on, and on, and on. I think they had 16K RAM. There were 2 - 5 1/4" floppy disk drives. One for whatever program you were using and the second for storage - no hard drive. Each program had multiple disk so the user had to switch from one disk to another. Each program used a combination of function keys for different operations.

Users had to learn some basic DOS programing and how to use a different, unrelated program for each application. Word Perfect for word processing, Lotus for spreadsheets and DBASE for data base functions. Later we used an application called Peachtree. It combined applications in one program - word processing, spreadsheet and data base. All of those programs were user configured. Of course Bill Gates did his thing and the government switched to MS DOS. Towards the end of my enlistment the first version of Windows was introduced. What a mess.

I attended several conferences and vender shows. I had the great good fortune to meet Admiral Grace Hopper. Early in her career she led the team that developed COBAL. She also coined the phrase "Computer Bug" and "De-Bugging" - or so I am told. The story is that the main frame went down on her shift. Those were the days of vacuum tubes and resistors. Each one had to be inspected individually. A moth was found in one of the resistors. The moth was supposedly taped in the Log Book with the notation "Computer Bug found - system de-bugged." That's the way I heard it. She was an amazing woman and considered the Godmother of all DPs. She urged young sailors to be creative and inventive - if it was good for you Unit, good for your Command and good for the Navy - do it! She said "It is easier to get forgiveness than it is to get permission."

I never cease to be amazed and fascinated at the rapid changes in technology. We've come a long way baby!

Oh - our first home computer had a whopping 64K RAM and used rigid disk for data storage. $2,500. :laugh:
 
As a comparison to the old stuff we used to work on the police/traffic control computers - a room full of modern hi tech gizmo's with a fire suppressant gas system - if the alarm went off we had 2 mins to get out. Could have been touch and go if you were in the middle of a re-boot [actually no it wouldn't - you wouldn't have made it out but that bit was sort of ignored in the safety briefings]. I wonder if sometimes we put too high a value on technology :(
 
Yes.

A university student works part time at my local market. He is taking a course called Technology and Ethics. He is working on a project that evaluates the impact of technology - good and bad - on different generations. He is starting with my generation - Baby Boomers - and working his way through the current generation - Generation Z or Centennials. He has agreed to let me read his paper when it is done. It should be interesting. I am most interested to see if and how it changes his ideas about child rearing and technology.
 
Is it me or does anyone else think we seem to use technology because we can not because we need it ? We have 'apps' that actually take longer to use than just doing the thing manually. Web companies [xxxx xxxx.com] that don't actually do anything useful but people somehow feel they MUST use them. An Internet clogged up with millions of gigabytes of complete trash that even the people that posted it have no more interest in. Completely bonkers :wacky:
 
@sidevalve

DITTO!

I love my man to pieces but he does, sometimes, make me crazy. When ever he gets a new ache, pain, cough, nasal drip or change in his BM he is on line trying to find what fatal disease he is dying from.
sidevalve said:
bonkers :wacky:
Click to expand...
is an understatement. Does he search reputable sites like CDC, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic? NO!! he searches advertisement sites!!! I can not tell you how many times I have had to research reputable sites to de-bunk the information on his ad sites before he spends money on a "miracle cure" for whatever disease he thinks he has.

Oh, My Man, I love him so! Good thing for him.
 
Yep... But I've only been working in IT since 1998 (I think)...
A few days ago (as in this week) I purchased a laptop with a 1tb solid state disk (SSD, or hard drive with no moving parts). We've got several external hard drives (conventional laptop ones) which are 2Tb each. They cost less than AUD $80 so roughly £46 each. Our old laptop's SSD was full and had less than a quarter of my photos on it. It was a 512Gb SSD.

Back when I was a child, my first computer came with a 4kb memory upgrade which was considered to be amazing. It was a ZX 81 which replaced the older ZX 80. Sadly it didn't work with the memory upgrade in place, constantly crashing. I even use another computer until I went to university almost a decade later. The ZX 80 & 81 both needed a tape recorder to save programs to and retrieve them from it, each and every time you use it. chess was about the only game I actually played on it because that was what my parents had bought and I couldn't afford to buy any others. Plus I was much more or a reader than a chess player!
 
ElizabethB said:
@sidevalve

DITTO!

I love my man to pieces but he does, sometimes, make me crazy. When ever he gets a new ache, pain, cough, nasal drip or change in his BM he is on line trying to find what fatal disease he is dying from.
is an understatement. Does he search reputable sites like CDC, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic? NO!! he searches advertisement sites!!! I can not tell you how many times I have had to research reputable sites to de-bunk the information on his ad sites before he spends money on a "miracle cure" for whatever disease he thinks he has.

Oh, My Man, I love him so! Good thing for him.
Click to expand...
If you read 'Three men in a boat' you will find at the beginning a piece where the hero reads a medical dictionary - and assumes he has the symptoms of every disease in it other than housemaids knee. Doctors medicine - bah humbug :laugh:
 
I recall approx. 1990, my parents purchased Mac Intoshes for the office and the warehouse which also has offices ..

Wow, we have come a long way ..
 
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