Technology has moved on a bit i mean a lot !

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Studio488commercial

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The New Modern warfare game is 120GB download, that is the equivelant storage space to stacking around 87,000 3.5" Floppy disks, if stacked they would be roughly the height of the eifell tower ! and if you had to by them at say 25p each it would cost £17,400
 
Yes indeed times change, I can recall sitting all day feeding some 40 odd FDD,s into a pc to install Microsoft Office and trying to install a parallel port printer was a nightmare, if you could get it to work.
 
Parallel port 'Centronics' printers were fine in my experience; it was serial printers that were a PITA.
 
You kids haven't lived. Spend three days writing your job in pencil on an assembler pad; spend another day looking up the opcodes for each line; feed the code in on a clicky Hex keyboard; set up the save command and watch the deck eat the tape. Clicky keyboard the code in again; get the programme saved; single step to your entry point and invoke run. Now work out why the damned thing has entered an endless loop...

...and you wonder why we old gits are so angry?

:tumbleweed:
 
Studio488commercial said:
64Mb 16 x 32 (Non Parity £369.00 !
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I came across an old receipt a while back from around 1980 for 4Kb of RAM. Cost about £60
Not that there was anything at the time capable of addressing it, but at that price...
64Mb would've cost £983,040
64Gb would've cost £1,006,632,960

My first hard drive was a 32Mb in 1986 for £250
At that price, 4Tb of storage would have set you back £32,768,000

It amuses me to hear people complain that memory and drives are so expensive these days. :rolleyes:
 
This thread is far too ful of old.
 
I only started programming in 1981 so I saved programs on cassette tape and typed on a horrible Sinclair keyboard when I started, none of this punched card business!

My first hard drive was 20MB in the Acorn Archimedes and cost about £400 in 1990, including the adding the interface to the computer. Didn't get a PC until 1994 (16MB RAM for £330)

Tori_T said:
I came across an old receipt a while back from around 1980 for 4Kb of RAM. Cost about £60
Not that there was anything at the time capable of addressing it, but at that price...
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The Zilog Z80 would address 64KB of RAM, as would the MOS 6502, as each had a 16 bit address bus...
 
The mini computer we had in our lab when I started working there had a massive 32K of 'magic' memory (shared between several boards) and had tape streamers to boot up, after appropriate vales where fed directly into the registers.
When purchased this system cost £30000 (IIRC it was an HP2113B) much more powerful than the 1K computer I had at home (a compukit 101)
 
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There were some really neat solutions though, I remember some printers where if you turned it off and on again you had to lift the lid and push a button which caused a little loop of paper tape to run through a reader to load the printer "firmware". And everything was so well made, really beautiful precision engineering. People actually used to gather around the pen plotters for a chat and to watch them perform their magic, you just don’t get that with inkjet plotters :)
 
sirch said:
There were some really neat solutions though, I remember some printers where if you turned it off and on again you had to lift the lid and push a button which caused a little loop of paper tape to run through a reader to load the printer "firmware". And everything was so well made, really beautiful precision engineering. People actually used to gather around the pen plotters for a chat and to watch them perform their magic, you just don’t get that with inkjet plotters :)
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To be fair, the the entertainment around us has got more sophisticated, watching a plotter is now a long way down the list of exciting things to do, just below, going for a p*** at the bottom of the garden and bringing back a bucket of coal :)
 
Studio488commercial said:
Hahah, the facts are though we all know someone in IT who used to be like this normally ending up as IT Director.
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The first "IT Director" I ever met had to be shown how to turn on his terminal (clue: large red switch with "On" at one end and "Off" at the other). Things improved and by the time I retired I had met one who knew how to put paper in the feed tray of his printer. Well, nearly... :naughty:
 
AndrewFlannigan said:
I was in heaven when we got our first hard drives. 5MB fixed + 5MB removable on 14 inch disks. Weight of unit: 100KG.
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Someone I used to know referred to the old HDDs he worked with as Warp Drives, because when they were turned on, it sounded like the ST:TOS warp engine sound effect as they slowly span up.
AndrewFlannigan said:
The first "IT Director" I ever met had to be shown how to turn on his terminal...
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I was told about one newly appointed director who demanded a top of the range computer, commensurate with his rank (at that time, a '486DX33). When the parts arrived, and were assembled, IT swapped the DX33 for the SX25 in the office's Novell server, put the '25 in the boss's box, and set the LED display on the front to read "33". He never noticed.
 
Tori_T said:
Someone I used to know referred to the old HDDs he worked with as Warp Drives, because when they were turned on, it sounded like the ST:TOS warp engine sound effect as they slowly span up.
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I shared my workspace with 2 such cabinets for a couple of years. :wideyed:
 
I remember having an Amstrad (2086?) PC which I then bought a 32 MB (yes, MB) hard drive for!!!
 
Some things are more annoying than ever, having to download said 120gb game onto a hard drive in a caddy hooked up to my console is far worse that my experience in the late 1980`s when I was a gamer. I just put the big square thing into the slot and it worked straight away lol.
 
cambsno said:
I remember having an Amstrad (2086?) PC which I then bought a 32 MB (yes, MB) hard drive for!!!
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The first hard drive I brought for use at home was 10MB.
I got it secondhand having seen it in the classified section of the local paper for £100!
 
Anyone else use a ZX80? 1kB, upgradable to a massive 8 (IIRC)! £80 + a soldering iron...
 
My younger brother had a ZX81 + 16K RAM pack (amazing what he managed to program into just 1K of memory).
 
Nod said:
Anyone else use a ZX80? 1kB, upgradable to a massive 8 (IIRC)! £80 + a soldering iron...
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Yes we had one - HATED the keyboard, not just an awkward touch sensitive thing but determined to second guess the command you were entering so loads of backspaces were needed if you wanted a different command with the same first letter!
 
You could always tell which kids at school had a ZX80/81; they'd all type with their thumbs, and look like they were trying to push the (full travel BBC) keys through the circuit board.
 
Tori_T said:
You could always tell which kids at school had a ZX80/81; they'd all type with their thumbs, and look like they were trying to push the (full travel BBC) keys through the circuit board.
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The BBC has a superb keyboard, I can't think of a "home micro" from the 1980s that was better in that regard. It's probably why I still use IBM Model M keyboards on my PCs to this day.
 
onomatopoeia said:
The BBC has a superb keyboard, I can't think of a "home micro" from the 1980s that was better in that regard. It's probably why I still use IBM Model M keyboards on my PCs to this day.
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It's I/O was generally very good. Including an Analogue input as standard, made it very good for interfacing.
 
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