The state of the art in 1956

I seriously doubt these rates of improvement are sustainable, in real terms there have been massive improvements in IT stuff over a short period, but how much more can we do, look at phones, the improvements are now very incremental rather than earth shattering, and most other things improve at a much slower rate than IT. This is just my gut feeling, and I know nowt about IT really :)
 
Jelster said:
I remember when I was cool (I was once, honest) as I had 16MB of RAM, and a 40MB HDD in the PC that I built.....
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Really? That seems rather imbalanced. My first PC (around 1992 or 1993 probably) had 4MB of RAM and a 100MB hard disk. I wouldn't have known what to do with 16MB!
 
We rented our first pc from radio rentals around 1992/93 ish.
I seem to recall it having a 25mb hard drive in it.
The logic behind renting was that as technology improved, we could upgrade easily without buying a new computer.
Never really worked out like that though....
 
StewartR said:
Really? That seems rather imbalanced. My first PC (around 1992 or 1993 probably) had 4MB of RAM and a 100MB hard disk. I wouldn't have known what to do with 16MB!
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A mate of mine worked for a commercial IT company selling custom built machines. I did him a favour which he repaid with 4 x 4MB RAM Sims. I had 4x1MB before that. At that point, DOS couldn't handle anything bigger than 40MB in terms of a drive. Of course, Windows 3.1 & DOS 5 (I think) changed all of that.
 
Box Brownie said:
Though never directly in the infant IT industry like a lot of you guys, this thread has triggered memories of meeting and being taught, in I think it was an FE class or other course I was doing, a lady who was one of the lead people in the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) project..................sadly I cannot remember her name.

Also seeing mention of Wang, when I was at school in the mid to late 60's into early 70's they had an arrangement with Birkbeck College and the school had a Wang terminal :LOL:
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Didn't Wang have the marketing slogan "Wang Cares"? :LOL:
 
rick448 said:
I seriously doubt these rates of improvement are sustainable, in real terms there have been massive improvements in IT stuff over a short period, but how much more can we do, look at phones, the improvements are now very incremental rather than earth shattering, and most other things improve at a much slower rate than IT. This is just my gut feeling, and I know nowt about IT really :)
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There definitely is a slowdown in the improvements in all forms of photography as sensors, lenses etc reach the limits of what they can do, and mirrorless is now the coming thing but the main push now and in the future is likely to be Computational Photography using machine learning.

Most companies are now bringing out more and more AI products which can extend what sensors, lenses etc can do and this trend will only accelerate.
 
rick448 said:
I seriously doubt these rates of improvement are sustainable...
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People have been saying that for decades. Sooner or later they'll be proved right, but there's no reason to suppose that we're currently right on the cusp of the progress starting to slow down.
 
Snapsh0t said:
Not in this country. I was there at the time and we had to explain very gently to the guys in Lowell (US HQ) why that slogan wouldn't work here.......
Some of our customers did refer to what we sold as 'Wang kit' however.
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One of the guys I used to know in Houston who did internet work was called Long Duong. Some names just aren't feasible here. :rolleyes:
 
StewartR said:
People have been saying that for decades. Sooner or later they'll be proved right, but there's no reason to suppose that we're currently right on the cusp of the progress starting to slow down.
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I once had an expert explain to me why processors faster than 1MHz could never be made. He was very convincing.
 
rick448 said:
I seriously doubt these rates of improvement are sustainable, in real terms there have been massive improvements in IT stuff over a short period, but how much more can we do, look at phones, the improvements are now very incremental rather than earth shattering, and most other things improve at a much slower rate than IT. This is just my gut feeling, and I know nowt about IT really :)
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I know about the same about IT and tech but a story about SDExpress cards popped up in a news feed - https://www.techadvisor.co.uk/new-product/storage/what-is-sd-express-3682258/ . Probably old news anyway - the story's dated August 2018.
 
petersmart said:
There definitely is a slowdown in the improvements in all forms of photography as sensors, lenses etc reach the limits of what they can do, and mirrorless is now the coming thing but the main push now and in the future is likely to be Computational Photography using machine learning.

Most companies are now bringing out more and more AI products which can extend what sensors, lenses etc can do and this trend will only accelerate.
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What he said!!
 
Nod said:
I was going to add a short BASIC programme but I've forgotten it all!

I used to work for a software house in the early '80s when most software for home and small office use was cassette based but a few larger pieces of software were on ROM. When Elite (?) was released on a floppy, they sent a copy to the programmers where I worked with the boast that at last there was a way to stop stuff being copied. The boys in the back room sent back a dozen copies in the next day's post! (IIRC, they copied the disks bit by bit to get round the anti copying widget.)
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Acornsoft did a few trick things to attempt to prevent copying of the floppy disks. One was to have a short (256 byte) loader that contained about 30 bytes of bootstrapping code that self modified and used the code itself as an encryption key to decrypt the remaining 220 bytes or so, thereby preventing the setting of breakpoints (no hardware breakpoints on the 6502, you had to patch in a break instruction which caused the decyrption to fail. That was a bit of a nuisance, but I got round it in the end. The code revealed was a special loader for the remainder of the program

The second was the special formatting of the floppy disk which was checked in the second stage of the loader loaded up by the 256 byte bootstrap. Reverse engineered out that - again not straightforward as it contained code to defeat attempts to run it under debuggers or reverse engineer it, so it took me a good deal more than one day. In my defence I was still at school and had homework to do in the evenings!

Much later I wrote a program to copy the custom format they put on the disk. From memory (it was nearly 35 years ago) instead of the sectors having the normal sequential numbering, they repeated multiple times on each track and weren't the standard size that the BBC ADFS used.

I only did it as a challenge to see if I could, I bought the game on cassette then again on floppy disk when I got a floppy controller and drive installed into my BBC micro, so I didn't have any need to copy it.
 
It’s incredible indeed. Seems only yesterday I was making rave music on my commodore Amiga and assuming that was the pinnacle of tech!
 
onomatopoeia said:
Acornsoft did a few trick things to attempt to prevent copying of the floppy disks.
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My first "personal" computer was an Acorn System 1 assembled on the kitchen table and it had a whole 256 bytes of RAM (yes: 256 BYTES). I managed to display the "alphabet" on the 9 character LED display and with enough cider inside you could almost see all the letters! :D
 
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