I remember a tech replacing a hard drive in one of our Vax mainframes circa 1988. The drive was 337mb, was the size of two shoe boxes and cost $20k.
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More progress 1918 to 1970? Or 1970 to today?
- Thread starter dbostedo
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I believe you are being very generous.
The IBM 370 mainframes for most mid size insurance companies in the early to mid '80 had between 4 MB to 16 MB of main memory.
1980, I remembered there was a GE computer in the back of the building. Taking up about 2,000 SF of floor space. That one had 8K worth of memory.
My first IBM desktop PC I bought for home in 1986/1987 was over $7,000. Bought a extra 10 MB internal hard drive for $600. I had an employee discount too.
Errr - are you talking hard drive or actual working memory?
If you're talking main memory, then we're talking K of core memory. The Univac 1108 could have up to 64K of core. The multiuser environment was supported by swapping each user's programs and data between core memory and hard drive. Swapping fast.
The PDP-8 mini started off with 4K of core. The 6MB disc drive platter was bigger and heavier than a 15" chop saw blade.
Also, don't forget, a lot of these processors had 'long instruction word' design so those memory numbers are a bit misleading. An instruction and the target of that instruction could often be stored as a single storage word - and it was completely possible to have single word infinite loops.
I wasn't kidding about >1000 scale factor improvement above. Anything improved that much is de facto new technology. And main memory is very much an example.
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Thread Starter
TS
At that time memory was not talked about in megs. Quantities were expressed in kilos and often didn't get a second digit.
In the early 80's when the disc drives for DEC PDPs were about the size of a large kitchen draw the removable disc capacity was 10MB.
So for computing, post 1970 is eleventy billion times better than pre 1970. I remember in 1972, 2nd grade we got to play with the punch cards and our class (mostly the teacher) stacked them for some geek to run them through a mainframe somewhere nearby. I'm pretty sure it didn't go well.
But the initial designs were in development starting with the space age... The 909730947230947th reason why 1950 is probably a much better before/after place to draw this line..
But the initial designs were in development starting with the space age... The 909730947230947th reason why 1950 is probably a much better before/after place to draw this line..
Redrawing the line to 1950 would make the answers trivial.
The 1970 line makes reasonable answers to the question require significant thought, and is therefore the right place to do it
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- Dec 2, 2015
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- 24,995
1918-1970
Widespread roads, gasoline, aircraft, spacecraft, transistor, microchp, widespread vaccines,anesthesia, antibiotics, , first heart transplant…
Figuring out how to get the genie out of the bottle with the first nuclear explosion on July 16,1945 changed everything. We still haven’t dealt with it, and using a hand held computer phone is nothing in comparison.
"Now we are all sons of bitches."
-Kenneth Bainbridge, test director
[J Robert] Oppenheimer later recalled that the explosion had reminded him of a line from the Hindu holy text, the Bhagavad-Gita:
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Widespread roads, gasoline, aircraft, spacecraft, transistor, microchp, widespread vaccines,anesthesia, antibiotics, , first heart transplant…
Figuring out how to get the genie out of the bottle with the first nuclear explosion on July 16,1945 changed everything. We still haven’t dealt with it, and using a hand held computer phone is nothing in comparison.
"Now we are all sons of bitches."
-Kenneth Bainbridge, test director
[J Robert] Oppenheimer later recalled that the explosion had reminded him of a line from the Hindu holy text, the Bhagavad-Gita:
"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Manhattan Project: The Trinity Test, July 16, 1945
www.osti.gov
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What happens to pretty much everything with a major electro magnetic pulse (solar flares weapons or whatever) will most of our computer controlled stuff become paperweights?
Pre 70 this would not have been such a long term issue.
Which of these scenarios sound more progressive?
Pre 70 this would not have been such a long term issue.
Which of these scenarios sound more progressive?
Well to be honest, if it comes to that, we're all fucked anyway... Intentional EMP is prelude to nuclear war.
Staying with 1918-1970
"On Aug. 8, 1919, young Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in Cheyenne with a long line of military cars, trucks and motorcycles. The Transcontinental Motor Truck Convoy entered the city on the Lincoln Highway during an evening thunderstorm.
The soldiers had spent 11 hours on the road that day, traveling from Kimball, Neb., to Cheyenne. Today, drivers on Interstate 80 can easily make the 66 miles between Kimball, Neb., and Cheyenne in less than an hour.
A few days before, on August 5, after leaving North Platte, Neb., the daily convoy log noted that many of the trucks had to be pulled through a 200-yard stretch of quicksand, resulting in a delay of seven hour and 20 minutes. A large, heavy truck called the Militor was able, after five unsuccessful attempts by other vehicles, to pull out one of the lighter trucks that had sunk into sand deep enough to cover both right wheels and its differential.
The purpose of the cross-country trip—never attempted before—was to determine the condition of the roads nationwide. The Cheyenne State Leader article explained that the 72 vehicles and personnel “showed signs of the road, but both were eloquent evidence of the efficiency” of the United States’ effort that helped win World War I the year before." READ MORE: https://www.wyohistory.org/.../eisenhowers-1919-road-trip...
"On Aug. 8, 1919, young Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower arrived in Cheyenne with a long line of military cars, trucks and motorcycles. The Transcontinental Motor Truck Convoy entered the city on the Lincoln Highway during an evening thunderstorm.
The soldiers had spent 11 hours on the road that day, traveling from Kimball, Neb., to Cheyenne. Today, drivers on Interstate 80 can easily make the 66 miles between Kimball, Neb., and Cheyenne in less than an hour.
A few days before, on August 5, after leaving North Platte, Neb., the daily convoy log noted that many of the trucks had to be pulled through a 200-yard stretch of quicksand, resulting in a delay of seven hour and 20 minutes. A large, heavy truck called the Militor was able, after five unsuccessful attempts by other vehicles, to pull out one of the lighter trucks that had sunk into sand deep enough to cover both right wheels and its differential.
The purpose of the cross-country trip—never attempted before—was to determine the condition of the roads nationwide. The Cheyenne State Leader article explained that the 72 vehicles and personnel “showed signs of the road, but both were eloquent evidence of the efficiency” of the United States’ effort that helped win World War I the year before." READ MORE: https://www.wyohistory.org/.../eisenhowers-1919-road-trip...
I was basing the guess on recalling someone said the computers used by NASA for Apollo 11 were 128 mb.
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Manned Space Center Houston had five IBM System/360 75J computers plus storage. I think each had 1mb of core memory. Other than that, I don’t know.
On the command module and lunar module the Apollo Guidance Computer (MIT) was roughly 72 kilobytes total, mostly ROM. Wire rope memory. The digital launch computer on the Sat V, LVDC (IBM), had roughly 32kbytes.
IBM100 - The Apollo Missions
www.ibm.com
Which is why they brought their sliderules! And they needed them to get 13 home..
Albert Einstein's theory of relativity requires that time travels in only one direction.
Progress, however is not so constrained.
www.skimag.com
As a kid in the '70's I was fortunate to be able to help out on trail-cutting, slash-stacking, rock-rolling volunteer workdays, those years the ski area was expanded westward with a new run cut every year, terrain served by the Big Mother lift (1976 center-pole Riblet chair).
The book "Just Crazy to Ski" (Deanna Morgan Kirby, Los Alamos Historical Society, 2003) details the 50-year history of the passion of the scientists/volunteers who created Pajarito Mountain ski area, run-by-run over many years. (My dad wrote the book's intro, which describes our family's transfer from Pennsylvania to New Mexico's skiing nirvana in 1972). It was supposed to be a 1-year assignment, but we never moved back east. My opinion is that the super-deep snow in '72-'73 was a significant factor in our staying west. Unfortunately, that year's snowfall was far above-average.
I remember visiting my dad's office in the early 1970's, he had a 4-function HP calculator that was secured to the desk with a bike-lock-type cable for security. He brought home boxes and boxes of computer cards that we used to create (then destroy) enormous towers. Just a few years later in high school, we all were able to get TI-30 scientific calculators thru a school group purchase for about $30 each. Our high school had a laboratory hand-me-down Digital PDP-11 mainframe in 1976 that we students could use for things like writing and playing Star Trek games, with output on a printer-terminal that communicated with the mainframe at a blistering rate of 300 baud.
Progress, however is not so constrained.
Many of those nuclear scientists blew off steam on weekends by going skiing. Here's a good Ski Magazine article...... (Ski magazine is now a tentacle of the Outside web Borg)
Deep Secrets at Los Alamos
When they weren’t busy splitting atoms, Manhattan Project scientists linked turns on nearby Pajarito.
www.skimag.com
As a kid in the '70's I was fortunate to be able to help out on trail-cutting, slash-stacking, rock-rolling volunteer workdays, those years the ski area was expanded westward with a new run cut every year, terrain served by the Big Mother lift (1976 center-pole Riblet chair).
The book "Just Crazy to Ski" (Deanna Morgan Kirby, Los Alamos Historical Society, 2003) details the 50-year history of the passion of the scientists/volunteers who created Pajarito Mountain ski area, run-by-run over many years. (My dad wrote the book's intro, which describes our family's transfer from Pennsylvania to New Mexico's skiing nirvana in 1972). It was supposed to be a 1-year assignment, but we never moved back east. My opinion is that the super-deep snow in '72-'73 was a significant factor in our staying west. Unfortunately, that year's snowfall was far above-average.
I remember visiting my dad's office in the early 1970's, he had a 4-function HP calculator that was secured to the desk with a bike-lock-type cable for security. He brought home boxes and boxes of computer cards that we used to create (then destroy) enormous towers. Just a few years later in high school, we all were able to get TI-30 scientific calculators thru a school group purchase for about $30 each. Our high school had a laboratory hand-me-down Digital PDP-11 mainframe in 1976 that we students could use for things like writing and playing Star Trek games, with output on a printer-terminal that communicated with the mainframe at a blistering rate of 300 baud.
128mb is a lot when you don't have anything besides computational functionality..
Think about the medical advancements since 1970.
I'm not sure you want to go down the road of the nuclear option if we are talking about progress, but I was thinking along similar lines. As in what key inventions and discoveries that we still use today that make modern life even possible. Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse affect our daily lives pretty heavily with distribution of electric power. But to me (a chemist) I submit the Haber-Bosch process for ammonia-based fertilizers as one of the most definitive step changes that we simply can not live without. Of course, similar to the nuclear genies above, Haber was also responsible for the development of poison gas for Germany in WWI, so again do we call this progress?
The weed is definitely better.
and in many states, legal.