OzSTOC
General Category => General Discussion => Topic started by: Kev Murphy on February 13, 2015, 09:13:44 AM
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Seems strange, on looking back...
How technology has advanced .... in Feb of 1995, I bought my first WINDOWS OS computer. (128Kb ram)
Back then, it used to cost $100 for 1 MEG of ram (4x256 Kb sticks)... I now have 16,000 MEG (or 1.6 million dollars worth , at the old price)
3 and a half inch floppy disks were the bees knees.. with 1.44 MEGabytes storage capacity. (at almost $4 each)
Compare that to a DVD nowadays, which may only cost 25 cents or so from Aldi, with 4.7 GIG of storage... or a BluRay disk, with 25 GIG.
Nowadays, I walk around the streets with 200 Gigabytes of storage on 3 USB sticks dangling from my keys.
An external hard drive of 20 MEG capacity on my previous computer cost me $550, in 1992.
in 1997, a 1.7 GIG hard drive was as big as you could get.. (and cost around $440.)
Nowadays I download files of that size, daily, within 10 minutes.
I now have 15 TERRABYTES of storage on my present computer. (Yep, thats 15,000 GIGABYTES !) ... and about to add another 4 Tbytes because I am running out of room.
Compare the computer capabilities of today, with the prices of 20 years ago, and realise that it would have cost several millions of dollars for that laptop or desktop that we now all own.
Not everything in life drops in price like this...
"Join the club, Join the club, Join the ESCORT club, ... 34 cents, and you're a member...." (Pack of 20)
Today, ciggys are around 75, 80 cents EACH!.... or over 93 cents each if bought from a servo!
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Now that is a GREAT POST thanks Kev. :clap :clap :clap
I am going to madly look around the house for any old Ram sticks to flog! :rofl
Escorts were the very first pack of durries I ever bought. Dad smoked Craven A Cork Tipped.
Cheers, Diesel
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You're both too hardcore for me! I was an effete Alpine smoker. And loved 'em.
And my first 'puter was a Vic20 with 3.5kb on board. I bought a 16kb extension board for it. I saved my programs to reel-to-reel cassettes. It took around 10 minutes to save a 16kb program.
The second was an Apple 2e with the 5.25" floppy drive that stored 350kb (IIRC) on really floppy disks, not like the top-of-the range later arriving 1.44mb in a rigid plastic case. I quickly got out of Apple (forever) and my first Pentium had a massive 40mb hard drive. Cost me thousands back in the mid-90s. When the "internet" came to PNG via a Bulletin Board, I was thankful to get 9600 kbps after much whistling and hash noise from the modem.
edit for floppy disk size- couldn't remember 5.25", thanks Steve and Brock.
The sleeves were actually a black plastic sheath with a friction modifying soft paper lining- never saw a cardboard one.
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You guys seem to forget that the term "floppy disc" described the original 5 1/4" floppy discs - they had a cardboard sleeve and were actually floppy. On our first home PC (can't remember how much RAM/ROM we had on that one), we fitted both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy disc drives and our friends thought we were at the technology forefront having a drive for those new tiny hard cased 3 1/2" discs.
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I too had a Vic20, followed by a C128. Still have the 128 in the shed with Disc drive, monitor, printer and stack of discs
First PC was a 286DX33 with 1meg of RAM and a 40Meg hard drive and a 2xCD drive (no DVDs then) a 3.5" drive and 5.25 Floppy drive. may even have some discs in the shed.
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My first computer was a Commodore 64 with the cassette tape drive for storage.
The first PC that I had anything to do with was a NEC with green screen and 20Mb hard-drive and had two 5 inch floppy drives (latest technology at that time). The teacher at the time said he couldn't see us needing anything larger
My first new PC was a Compaq with a massive 10GB hard drive, a 1.44 Mb floppy drive, CD drive and state of the art 5 speaker surround sound
We now have 2 all in one PCs with touch screens (1.5Tb and 1.0Tb) and one laptop (600Gb) and three tablets between us.
I gave up smoking when they got to $3 for a packet of 25 (Keating was treasurer).......
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I gave up smoking when they got to $3 for a packet of 25 (Keating was treasurer).......
Keating was treasurer up to 1991. Say 23 years at maybe 3 packs per week = 3588 packs at $3 = $10764 in 1990 dollars.
1990 $3.0 = $5.43 according to the inflation calculator.
So a figure of $19,500 is within a bull's roar of what you've saved in 2014 dollars.
That doesn't take into account the tax on ciggies is much higher now, so it's not just inflation that has taken the price up. You won't find any $5.43 packs of 20 in Oz. Bali maybe. :grin
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My very first computer was a Heathkit H8....1978... came in kitform, and had to be assembled... cost around $400. Extras, that were not included in the kit, had to be purchased separately... first was a 4Kb card.. I think it was SRAM? (another $150) and a serial card to control an external tape deck for storage. (Dig deep, that was another $100 for the card...and then the cassette deck, more $$$)... and THEN of course, you needed a video terminal... had only twelve lines of green upper case text on the screeen.... and a bank of switches as a keyboard...
Was sort of like buying a very basic car, with optional extras, (at a cost) "You want seats?... front and back?... and a spare wheel?... maybe a steering wheel, too? Would you like an engine fitted as well?... do you have a gearbox, or would you like us to fit one for you?... do you have a windscreen?... we can do a very good deal on tyres, should you require them? and we have a large range of batteries to choose from, very handy if you want lights fitted, and would like to park with them switched on, or drive at night. We can also fit an electric starter motor, which can be used to start the engine, instead of having to manually crank it, or push start it?"
:rofl
Commodore 64 was the next step, but that was around 1985 before I could afford that.
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I gave up smoking when they got to $3 for a packet of 25 (Keating was treasurer).......
Keating was treasurer up to 1991. Say 23 years at maybe 3 packs per week = 3588 packs at $3 = $10764 in 1990 dollars.
I wish..........any saving made from giving up smoking was offset by the regular increase in fuel excise which used to happen back then
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My very first computer was a Heathkit H8....1978... came in kitform, and had to be assembled...
Wasn't there an Oz kit called "something Bee"? I know a mate had one- similar set-up. Reckoned I could run my little business back then with it.
My second computer (Apple II+, as I recall now, the 2e came later) had the green screen with dot matrix characters. At least the Vic20 had colour!!
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<blockquote>
</blockquote>Wasn't there an Oz kit called "something Bee"? I know a mate had one- similar set-up. Reckoned I could run my little business back then with it.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=microbee+computer&es_sm=122&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=_IzdVJ9-j_HyBY_WgYAB&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1680&bih=925 (https://www.google.com.au/search?q=microbee+computer&es_sm=122&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=_IzdVJ9-j_HyBY_WgYAB&ved=0CAgQ_AUoAQ&biw=1680&bih=925)
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Microbee, and of course thr TRS80, Sinclair ZX spectrum....
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You guys seem to forget that the term "floppy disc" described the original 5 1/4" floppy discs - they had a cardboard sleeve and were actually floppy. On our first home PC (can't remember how much RAM/ROM we had on that one), we fitted both 5 1/4" and 3 1/2" floppy disc drives and our friends thought we were at the technology forefront having a drive for those new tiny hard cased 3 1/2" discs.
The 5 and a quarter inch floppy had 180 Kb capacity... or 360 Kb, if double sided ... I think I still have some old ones somewhere in a box?
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I obviously had the Rolls Royce version with 360kb capacity. :thumbsup
It wouldn't fit a low-res photo these days!
What a shame the Australian Microbee computer lost out in the competitive computer stakes. They obviously were right up there with the big guys at the start.
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Ah, the nostalgia of it all. I was a self-employed software engineer until a heart attack opened my eyes to leave that sort of stress. I'll never forget tho, one system I bought and as I always did - I shopped around and got the best price - a Toshiba "portable". It had a fold-down Orange plasma screen (not colour), 2Mb RAM, 20Mb hard drive, 3.5 1.44 Mb hard floppy. No battery - had 2 b plugged in. That was about 1987.
$13,750! WOW:
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The first hard disk drive, like so many innovations in computing, came from IBM in 1956. It was called the IBM Model 350 Disk File and was a huge device. It had 50 24-inch disks contained inside a cabinet that was more than twice the size of a refrigerator and anything but lightweight. This hulk of a storage unit could store a whopping 5 MB of data...just a little more capacity than 3 x 3 and a half inch floppy disks, but it was enough to handle all of New York's banking at the time.
(http://i154.photobucket.com/albums/s277/cool_blue_ice_2002/ibm%20hdd.jpg)
It took 51 years before hard disk drives reached the storage capacity of 1 TB (terabyte, i.e. 1,000 GB). This happened in 2007. In 2009, the first hard drive with 2 TB of storage arrived. So while it took 51 years to reach the first terabyte, it took just two years to reach the second... and now 6 years on, Kingston has a 1Tb USB flash drive available.
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I was working for Telecom in the early 80s and we were supplied with a Wang computer, which none of us office staff knew how to work at first. I'm pretty sure it had big floppy disks, about 8 inch or so. The brief mention of PNG reminds me of a Datsun 1200 which my mate owned and which had been imported to PNG from Japan and then brought into Australia privately. We ended up rolling the car in the ACT, with me in the back seat. The rear window was normal glass, not heat tempered, and broke into large shards. I was lucky not to be slashed. How could a manufacturer put this on the market in PNG. When manufacturers complain about the red tape in Australia, it is there to protect us from their profit mentality
Off my soap box now.
:wht11
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Nice topic.
My first was a Tandy 1000, around 1988. 2 5.25" disk drives, so that when I copied discs, I didn't even need to remove the source disc to put in the destination disc!
No hard drive, I upgraded from a monochrome to an RGB monitor (4 colours) in 1990. It had 256K of RAM, which I saved up and upgraded to 384K. That was hard work for a 10 year old. I reckon I learned so much about what I know about these things by just tinkering, writing silly code in BASIC or Pascal, and playing text based adventure games.
A mate had an old Amstrad with the tape player. Clunky thing, but I remember he had some great games on it. I also remember my school had a small room between the two year 6 rooms that had microbees. I remember hearing somewhere that my primary school was one of the first to have a dedicated computer room.
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For a bit of a comparison...
I am doing an upgrade to my PC at the moment:
8 core, 4 GB CPU
32 GB ram
13 TB of internal hard drives.
10.5 TB of external hard drives.
And dual monitors.
When I first got in to computers I never thought they would ever advance this much.
Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk
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I'm outta here. I've obviously logged on to the wrong site. I have no idea what you guys are even sayin'. This is all Dutch to me.
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How could a manufacturer put this on the market in PNG. When manufacturers complain about the red tape in Australia, it is there to protect us from their profit mentality
Off my soap box now.
It's entirely probably it wasn't a factory glass. In PNG the theft of windscreens and other vehicle glass was fairly common. The windscreen of my Datson ute was cut out one night in my own front yard. The thieves needed it because of the high incidence of rocks through windscreens in the country. I put 1/8" steel strips pop riveted to the frame to stop the next one being pinched.
Ah, those were the days! :fp
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No hard drive, I upgraded from a monochrome to an RGB monitor (4 colours) in 1990. It had 256K of RAM, which I saved up and upgraded to 384K. That was hard work for a 10 year old. I reckon I learned so much about what I know about these things by just tinkering, writing silly code in BASIC or Pascal, and playing text based adventure games.
Now you're talking! I used to type in BASIC games from computer magazines. That was wonderful fun, especially when they worked! And I loved playing those text based "adventure" games. Simple pleasures that today's gamers wouldn't understand because there was no shooting or blood.
The knowledge I gained from the BASIC games I put to good use writing a navigation/ flight planning programme in Quickbas for the MS DOS. It meant I only had to type in my landing points for the day, the refuelling points and time on ground at each destination and it would print it out onto a Flight Plan form that I could submit to Flight Service and have my day completely planned, including fuel required, tracks, distances, ETIs, ETAs and LSALTs.
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A mere 20 years ago I was still wotking and repairing magnetic core memory ( look it up if you dont know what it is) on one of works computers in a radar. At the same time one of our new fangled automated test sets was still using 8 inch floppies.
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I was working for Telecom in the early 80s and we were supplied with a Wang computer, which none of us office staff knew how to work at first. I'm pretty sure it had big floppy disks, about 8 inch or so.
I remember the computer I used in Telecom Australia in the mid 80s, it had an 8 inch floppy drive and we used to run Wordstar 2000 from the disk whenever we wanted to write a report. The printer was a dot matrix that took ages to print anything and sounded like it was going to fly apart at any time. We were stunned by how wonderful it all was.
Then of course there were the old Telex machines with the punched tape on which we had to send reports to all stations every morning from Route Control.
I bought a second hand 286 machine in 1992 with 1.2 meg of RAM, 20mb hard drive and a 1.44 floppy drive and a CGA monitor. I had a game called Tank that I ran on it, at the time I thought the graphics were awesome. The whole thing cost $1900.
Technology sure has come a long way all right.
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A mere 20 years ago I was still wotking and repairing magnetic core memory ( look it up if you dont know what it is) on one of works computers in a radar. At the same time one of our new fangled automated test sets was still using 8 inch floppies.
A very good article about it here:
http://www.corememoryshield.com/report.html (http://www.corememoryshield.com/report.html)
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I remember the computer I used in Telecom Australia in the mid 80s, it had an 8 inch floppy drive and we used to run Wordstar 2000 from the disk whenever we wanted to write a report. The printer was a dot matrix that took ages to print anything and sounded like it was going to fly apart at any time. We were stunned by how wonderful it all was.
Dot matrix printers! What marvellous things they were. We've all had one of those at some time. Ratta-tat-tat! :grin
On my VIC20, the printer couldn't put tails on p, y and g so it pushed them up and the tail sat on the line. :crackup
I've always kept a diary and in 1990 I began keeping it on a computer. Wordstar was the processor of choice.
Why change? I still switch into Wordstar on my XP machine to write my daily account.
<CTL>+K+B to begin a block, <CTL>+K+K to end a block. <CTL>+K+W to copy a block for inserting...
None of those fancy meece things to select text and right click to copy!
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<CTL>+K+B to begin a block, <CTL>+K+K to end a block. <CTL>+K+W to copy a block for inserting...
None of those fancy meece things to select text and right click to copy!
Windows still retains the original "Alt plus first letter" (Alt F = File) commands which were the norm before the mouse . Plus navigation of those commands using the arrows L,R,U &D still apply. So if your modern tech WiFi mouse battery dies you can still use your PC
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I was locked away in school in Melbourne for 6 years hard labour late 70.
Our school had a room which was part of the library and was all computer it seemed.
Too grown up for any but the best of sixth form and funnily enough I only ever remember one master being interested in it.
My first computer was a hand-me down around 10 years ago. Don t remember what brand or how cool it was but it gave me my first hissy fit ...stupid thing.
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Times have changed cos now I know the power-point in the wall rules supreme and this puter knows who's boss now.
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IBM computers (some would say the predecessor of all home computer) were not very good when they were first released however their advertising campaign was so brilliant that they killed off all the competition.
Also the Apple Mac desk top was first released on the Commodore computer, however Commodore were never seen as serious computers and eventually died, however there are still fans to this day. I still have a working Amiga 2500 which runs three OS's including Windows 3.1.1.
A.
(http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/xq90/673/AL1oAU.jpg) (https://imageshack.com/i/ipAL1oAUj)
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No computers when I was at school, but in high school I did see a calculator, it was about the size of a netbook and 3 times as thick with a paper roll coming out of the top.
My Father owned a Service Station, (that's a petrol station for the young ones) and had an adding machine the size of a typewriter. He used this when doing the accounts.
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The first programmable device that I had was a calculator that allowed around 128 steps of computation. You could punch little rectangular holes out of a cardboard strip that fed into it to load your series of computations. I used to use it to convert marks in tests into percentages. It had little bulbs with filaments in the shape of numerals- probably 8 of them. I can still remember the odd smell it emitted when warmed up. I think it was a Hewlett Packard, but that part is fuzzy.
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Speaking about Commodores? .. Amiga name didn't actually die, they were bought out by a german company named Escom. In their own time, Commodores were legendary, with superior colour graphics and sounds over other contempory computers available.. Samsung and Dell attempted to muscle in and effectively remove them from the competetive market but were outbid by Escom.
More info here.. http://www.unitechelectronics.com/unauth.htm (http://www.unitechelectronics.com/unauth.htm)
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There were a few tv series that used the Amiga to generate the graphics for the show (Seaquest DSV) the next choice was a cray computer (SUPER Puter) Also used in airports for flight information displays. {IBM was way too expensive}
Remember the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey and the computer HAL 2000. The makesrs of the movie wanted to call the puter an IMB 2000 but IBM said no way, so some clever person shifted the letters one to the left and IBM became HAL
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For those of you that are SiFi buffs all graphics in Babylon 5 where also generated by the Amiga. As some experts said "The Amiga is probably 10 years ahead of it's time, even the executives at Amiga don't know what it is capable of". Truly it was the first of the Multimedia PC's.
Amiga is currently owned by a US company (since 2005) after Escom went belly up although the US company hasn't really done anything with the name or the brand.
A.
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Well..... intereting reading.
My first introduction to computers was a Canon programmble desktop calculator at school. It had one line of neon Nixie tubes (that is what those little bulbs with the individual wire frame numbers are called). So after being introduced to it at a double maths that straddled lunch, I spent the entire lunch time writing a program which made it look like a digital clock displaying the time. They were so expensive the school only had 2 of them.
Then when I was in the Army we had a maintenace computer that had punch card terminals and no screens in the workshops. You had to gave 3 cards to insert into the reader, one to identify you, one to identify the job, and one to identify the task (book in, maintenance, parts, book out etc.)
Then in '86 my young bride did a training course in WordPerfect and wanted a home computer to practise with. So off we went to CCS computers on Gympie Road in Strathpine and after much deliberation and a little arguing for the right to spend that little bit more $500+) to get the newest monitor and video card we walked out with a 8088 8 MHz processor PC with 1 whole MB of RAM and 2 (count em) 2 x 5.25 inch floppy drives and a copy of MS DOS 4.2 (if I remember correctly) and an EGA monitor (16 colours) and an OKI 9 pin dot matrix printer for the princely sum of over $2,500. And no hard drive.
We didn't have a copy of WordPerfect but eventually acquired one :whistle from somewhere. The 2 floppies came in handy because WP took up 2 360k floppies so you could put both in after DOS loaded and load the whole program.
Before we got WP I played around with GW Basic that came with DOS 4.2 converting codes from magazines to get it to work on DOS.
In the early 90's I bought a 2nd hand 20 MB drive for $70 that had a faulty head and was able to low level format it so we then had a 10 MB hard drive.
Around this time the 286s and 386s were hitting the market but SWMBO didn't think that was a necessary expense so I found a microprocessor chip ($80 from Dick Smiths) which would fit into the 8088 slot and allowed me to increase the clock speed to 10 MHz with only the occasional overheating shutdown.
Eventually the old beast wouldn't stay alive and we got a Pentium 4 with 16 MB ram and a 120 MB hard drive and a new monitor capable of 16 million colours. :wow
Now we have an i7 laptop with 2 x 1 TB HDD and 4 GB RAM which we bought a couple of years ago for less than we paid for the firsy PC. On top of that we 2 HP XEON workstations with 4 GB RAM and two HDDs each. Can't remember the size, but I rescued those 2 from a skip at work. My son has handed down his Laptop which is a centrino 2 and we also have a colour scanner inkjet and a 2 tray Lexmark laser (I rescued this from the skip at work too) its fault was a hidden paper jam between the finishing rollers. It originally had a duplexer but that died last weekend with perished rubbers.
Then of course there are the 2 smart phones and the tablet.
Going back as far as the 80s though is 30 years.
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Yep, Gary... the thread stretched and grew... I mentioned something about '78 at one stage, so almost 40 years...
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Yep 78 or 79 is where I started. But it does say 20 odd years so your covered. :thumb
I leearnt:
gwbasic
Turbo Basic
HP Basic
Fluke Basic
Quick Basic 4.5
Fluke Metcal
HP/Agilent/Keysight VEE
Visual Basic for Applications
And a little C++
Alot of my programs control Test Equipment to either set it up or record measurements, evaluate the results and print the reports.
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(http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e136/Pixtor/20yearslater_zps79ee61b6.jpg)
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([url]http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e136/Pixtor/20yearslater_zps79ee61b6.jpg[/url])
.... WITH a packet of cigarettes...
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My first computer was a C64 in about 1982. Last year of primary school one of the teachers brought his C64 in from home and did computer programming (for,next loops etc with the 4 top maths students from the school. I was lucky enough to be one of these students. Second year high school and they had computer rooms where every student had a lesson once a week.....
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Word has it that Biggles first Hand Held Device was
(http://i1262.photobucket.com/albums/ii610/pmdodds1/Stuff/da9d874d065909daa29e8cea58786366_zps72483be7.jpg)
And Biggles first Desktop was
(http://i1262.photobucket.com/albums/ii610/pmdodds1/Stuff/4aa6ffcce8e70b6e0a135f0c8706444b_zps6779f575.jpg)
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:crackup
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Dang- who's been looking in my cupboard?