Re: This is what we did here 12 years ago

On Thu, 05 Apr 2007 21:09:36 -0700, Tim May
<timcmay@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In article <l6eb13hd5qfmrthauqh37i24uc7rupk7mu@xxxxxxx>, Lawrence
Glickman <Lawrence_Glickman@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Nice find. Nice price. We don't have any Costcos around here. We do
have Circuit City and Best Buy, but I'm not on the market for any
computer stuff at the moment so even though they might have similar,
it hasn't come to my attention yet.


After I got home I Googled this drive. Apparently a bunch of mail order
prices have it at about the same price.

Just enter the obvious things, like "Western Digital," "MyBook," and
"500."

I wanted to get a 1 TB external for less than $500, but a 500 GB for
much less than $250 is an even better deal. By the time I'm really
needing a 1 TB, they'll be down to $300.

(I'm drooling over the new 8-core Mac Pro, using two quad-core 64-bit
Xeons ("Clovertowns"). Priced at less than what I paid for some of my
earlier Mac IIs 15 years ago, but now offering 8 x 3.0 GHz = 24 GHz of
CPU power. A big improvement over my first home-built PC, using a 1 or
2 MHz 8080A. A mere factor 10,000 or more in speed, not even counting
the difference between 8-bits and 64-bits, not even counting the
difference between 8 KB of RAM and the 2 GB of RAM my laptop now has.
Not counting the difference between the 80 MB disk drive I paid $1400
for in 1987 and the 500 GB drive I paid $169 for today.)



--Tim May

I remember somebody saying that nobody other than the military would
ever need a computer, and they only used them, at the time, to
calculate trajectories.

Then I remember seeing the size of the first mainframes, which were as
large as bus station waiting room. And the tape readers each were the
size of refrigerators. And a console the size of the Starship
Enterprise's control desk was where some geek sat, alongside a printer
half the size of a volkswagen bus.

All this of course had to be kept inside an air conditioned vault,
since it ran on vacuum tubes (diodes) and needed to be cooled. Beyond
that, the media, tapes, were fragile.

The history of the personal computer is quite a read. Either
Wickipedia or somesuch should have an illustrated history of the
machine's evolution over the years.

Today, not only do half of all household in the USA have a personal
computer...half of them are connected to the world wide web.

So yesterday's anomaly has become today's "appliance." Walk into any
store, buy one off the shelf, take it home, and you probably have all
the software you'll need already installed. It boggles the mind. In
fact, some jet aircraft cannot be flown without computer assistance,
some of our stealth bombers being a case in point.

Microchips are now ubiquitous. They have found their way into
everything. I'm getting by with the Celeron 2.5 gigahertz CPU, but
just. OS releases have become so expansive, that I dare not even
think of putting MS Vista on this thing. With only 500MB of RAM, and
only 2.5 GHz of CPU speed, I don't even fit in at the low end of
what's needed to run the new BLOATWARE.

I don't know where it is all going to end up, but I know one thing for
certain. The technology has eaten away at my finances over the years
like a hungry animal. I'm in no hurry to get aboard the Vista Train.

Lg


.

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