New HD

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A little bit of computer history for the younger members. 1956, delivery of new IBM HD

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Bif

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Put's everything in perspective..and makes me greatful for the stuff I have today...
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$3,874 for 32K PC and line printer. That was expensive for 1984. Out of reach for most people.
 

Bif

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I remember spending $300 on a calculator in the day!... thought I was on Star Trek! Lol!
and don't even get me started on digital watches!;)
 
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yeah me too. We needed a calculator in school but it could not be one to be programmable. So I got a Casio FX991H which still works to this day....
 
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Yes I too remember my first calculator 1968 it was expensive, but a big step up from the the Slide Rule, which I also still have. The calculator had those horrible Red LEDs or whatever. LOL
 
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I remember those too. I think I had a TI prior to the casio but it ate batteries like crazy. If I made it through the school day without changing batteries, I got it done.....

Oh well, those were the old times where everything was a lot easier....
 

Trouble

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And now, for a couple hundred bucks, you have a phone in your hand that is more capable and more powerful than almost anything that has come before in recent tech history.
Good times.
 
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^^^ True but the phone has nowhere near the I/O bandwidth that some of those old mainframes/supercomputers had... but to be fair, put the equivalent CPU in a modern PC rather than a phone and you are quite right.
Actually a modern PC chip with a fast gaming GPU running Linux is a satisfactory supercomputer out of the box. If Intel offered a vector processor instruction set on chip would far out perform them on the same problems.
 

Trouble

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I actually spent some time at Control Data Institute in a Washington DC suburb after I got out of the Army in 1971, working on and around some of that big iron from the likes of Sperry (Utah / Rand) that were all about the size of my three door refrigerator or larger.
Input was done via 80 column keypunch cards and data was stored on reels of magnetic tape. Not sure how that ranks by way of throughput or I/Os, but......
Conceptually that would be like comparing a hand crank to start early model A or T ford with a Tesla
 
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I remember spending $300 on a calculator in the day!... thought I was on Star Trek! Lol!
and don't even get me started on digital watches!;)

Yep at great cost, bought a HP45 (drumroll: "with the GOLD key") in '73. Sold it some time ago on eBay and got a packet for it.
 
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