the price of computer storage is insane!!!

[raggie33]

lol i recall paying like 150 bucks for a 14 gig hardrive the old spining kind. but recetly i got a 1000 gig intel ssd drive for 80 bucks lol

 

[Lynx_Arc]

It is always gotten cheaper and cheaper. My first computer had a whopping 4MB of memory and a few years later I upgraded it to 16MB of ram and had more than I could use. My hard drive was 80MB and I upgraded to 360MB and had tons of room for a few years. Now with video and games with super high resolution 3D graphics that eat GB of memory what I thought 1GB was huge now 1TB is small now. I guess they are going to talk about PB? Petabyte or 1000TB next.

 

[raggie33]

ordered a micro sd card lol cant weigh even 1 gram and its 512 gb lol. i now build retro video game consoles to raise money for bills

 

[Lynx_Arc]

Yeah, 4 years ago I put a 200GB micro SD card in my phone and have to download digital movies to fill it up as my music collection is only about 60GB of it and pictures and video recordings probably 25 GB. At the time they said it would take a 2TB SD card.

 

[Poppy]

Last year I bought a Seagate 2Terabyte back up plus SSD drive for about $80. Now they are down to $49 on amazon. I bought it to store thousands of scanned photographs. I bought the high speed scanner, just never got around to it, because in part, I didn't decide how I want to catalog them.

Yeah. my first IBM PC clone had 20 or 40 megs hard drive, and I was hot stuff, when I added a 120 meg HD. I used a slide rule for calculations in chemistry and physics in high school. When I got to college, people were using Texas Instruments calculators.

Man have we seen some changes!

 

[raggie33]

great input everyone o ilove tech history. i think its becuase i spent most my life poor not being able to afford the good stuff now i own better stuff then iwanted just took some time lol.

 

[aznsx]

lol i recall paying like 150 bucks for a 14 gig hardrive the old spining kind. but recetly i got a 1000 gig intel ssd drive for 80 bucks lol

Hard to believe where we've come to. Used to work with these - 14" platters, 154mB, 55 pounds to carry around, and probably cost about a year's pay (never had to buy one - carrying them around was bad enough)

http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/priam/3350_6650_15450_brochure.pdf

 

[Lynx_Arc]

I once worked on memory boards in high school that were the size of 2 pieces of paper side by side and had about 150 chips on them to make up 2k of memory for a computer that was in a rack the size of a bookshelf. Now likely the space needed for that amount of memory can fit on the head of a pin.

 

[KITROBASKIN]

I used a slide rule for calculations in chemistry and physics in high school.

Man have we seen some changes!

Hey Poppy, did you ever work with a circular slide rule? Boy that was ultra cool (in these eyes) back in those days.

 

[jtr1962]

I once worked on memory boards in high school that were the size of 2 pieces of paper side by side and had about 150 chips on them to make up 2k of memory for a computer that was in a rack the size of a bookshelf. Now likely the space needed for that amount of memory can fit on the head of a pin.

Actually on the head of a pin (~1 square mm) you could fit about 10 GB of V-NAND using the latest process. Not sure how much SDRAM, but probably at least tens of megabytes.

 

[jtr1962]

lol i recall paying like 150 bucks for a 14 gig hardrive the old spining kind. but recetly i got a 1000 gig intel ssd drive for 80 bucks lol

SSD capacity has become high enough, and the price low enough, that for the majority of people an SSD provides adequate storage. Unless you store lots of videos, most people can get by with 500 GB or 1 TB. At less than $100/TB, it's a no brainer to get an SSD.

I'm hoping SSDs reach price parity with spinning disks in the next few years.

 

[Poppy]

Hey Poppy, did you ever work with a circular slide rule? Boy that was ultra cool (in these eyes) back in those days.

Sorry no. I n ever even saw one.

 

[bykfixer]

Hey Poppy, did you ever work with a circular slide rule? Boy that was ultra cool (in these eyes) back in those days.

I still use a slide rule for paving estimates. I had an app on an android but enjoy watching the youngsters eye go all googly when I whip out the slide rule. They really flip out when I whip out the bicycle grip with swivel antenna divining rod and show them where an underground pipe is. lol

Years ago during the red display Texas Instrument days I had a circular slide rule for calculating rain fall volumes in order to establish a required drainage pipe size. Elliptical pipe required using the Texas Instruments machine when you needed a 4 foot tall pipe but could only bury it 3 feet deep. You just decide how wide the 30" tall oval pipe needs to be. But I used it for erosion control calculations when I was a plan reviewer.

 

[jtr1962]

Thankfully when I was in high school (1977-1980) we were past the slide rule days. That's when electronic scientific calculators became affordable to the masses. I played around with a slide rule a few times. It made me appreciate electronic calculators even more. The only advantage of a slide rule was not needing a power source, but solar calculators which could run on dim room light negated even that advantage.

 

[Poppy]

And now we have video games on our phones. Oh wait! We have phones!

 

[aznsx]

And now we have video games on our phones. Oh wait! We have phones!

We had a phone the day I was born. You must be referring to handheld portable wirelessly networked computers that can also make a phone call, in addition to shoot photos, shoot and play video, make coffee, etc., etc. (which I don't yet have)

 

[aznsx]

Thankfully when I was in high school (1977-1980) we were past the slide rule days. That's when electronic scientific calculators became affordable to the masses. I played around with a slide rule a few times. It made me appreciate electronic calculators even more. The only advantage of a slide rule was not needing a power source, but solar calculators which could run on dim room light negated even that advantage.

You had it way too easy. In the latter days of my education I had a 'scientific' calc, but we weren't allow to use them. Get caught with one during an exam and that would get you a trip to see the headmaster! They wanted us to have that background / depth of knowledge, and in retrospect, is was probably good - although it would be overkill in 2021. When I graduated I went to work for TI and had my revenge, but then moved on to using HP when I discovered RPN. Gotta give the slide rule credit though, it ALWAYS worked - high reliability device! Speaking of reliability, I still use my HP11C regularly and it's within reach as I type, so I guess it's been as reliable as my slide rule so far. I'm still kicking myself for leaving my HP16 at a job I left hastily though. Slide rule don't do binary / hex very well.

 

[bykfixer]

Back in the early Android days, like brown sugar, chocolate cake, dairy queen or whatever I had tools on my phone. A tape measure, protactor, all kinds of calculators and such back when it was easy to crack open the operating system. It was called rooted and I even had a Mario run across the screen when the phone was turned on.

Not that I was smart enough to do it my son rooted my phone and there was an underground type "google play" where all kinds of cool apps could be had. Back then the phone had a headphone jack, micro sd card slot and swappable battery. But then egg salad or frosted flakes or some new operating system made all that stuff obsolete.

If I recall correct the phone had a whopping 8gb of built in memory and 16gb sd card. It may have even used the ultra slick 3g data.

 

[KITROBASKIN]

Perhaps one possible way for our fellow humans to understand, math is essentially able to describe anything composed of matter (and more!); Mathematics is a language of the Universe where we might be able to communicate with other beings from other planets/dimensions if they exist. Maybe showing and describing a circular slide rule to others will possibly show them a miniscule facet of the beauty, the perfection of arithmetic existence.

 

[aznsx]

Perhaps one possible way for our fellow humans to understand, math is essentially able to describe anything composed of matter (and more!); Mathematics is a language of the Universe where we might be able to communicate with other beings from other planets/dimensions if they exist. Maybe showing and describing a circular slide rule to others will possibly show them a miniscule facet of the beauty, the perfection of arithmetic existence.

"Far out!" KB