I remember when I was a kid in 1981 my mum and dad got me a ZX81 for Christmas and 4 months later a 16k ram pack for my birthday. The ram pack cost £49.99 and I know it was a lot of money back then and I know my folks saved up and sacrificed so they could buy it!
Amazon have just popped a 32gb micro SD card through the letterbox and it cost about £12, less than the cost of 3 pints down the pub.
Doing some rough maths, the cost per kilobyte was £3.12 back in the early 80's and extrapolating this 32gb would have cost about £98 million!
Size wise, the micro SD card is about the size of a 5 pence coin. The equivalent 2 million odd ram packs would fill a warehouse.
Astonishing really and what is around the corner!?
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What really amazes me in the thickness of the interconnects in ics. Currently as narrow as 22nm.
Look at your finger nails. The grow at about 1nm per second.
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>> What really amazes me in the thickness of the interconnects in ics. Currently as narrow
>> as 22nm.
Down to 14nm in Intel Core M cpus :o
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>> what really amazes me in the thickness of the interconnects in ics. Currently as narrow
>> as 22nm
Well as stated the latest process allows for 14nm... but that's the transistor size not any interconnects.
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Yeah those of us long in the tooth on computers can tell you plenty of stories like these. Here's a 288mb disk from about the time I started in IT. For scale, your hand went under the bar across the top of the drive, as you had to put this into a washing machine size unit then screw it down before removing the plastic housing so that the heads could enter the platters.
www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/DiskPlatter1988.htm
and here is the unit it went into
www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/DiskPackRA60A-270MB.jpg
We had rows and rows of these in the P&O data centre.
I repeat, this was 288 mb. Not Tb, not Gb but Mb. Wouldn't even hold a fraction of Windows 7. The very modest library of photos I took on my most recent holiday wouldn't even fit on this And it cost a small fortune.
Just browsing I found an article about Wang introducing new low end IBM compatible PCs. The cheapest had two 360 floppy drives and was $3300. One with 10mb disk came in at $5050. Stuff is cheap today!
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Pretty much everything I was using when I started can now be found on display as a relic in the Boston Computer Museum.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDP-11
What's striking is *HOW* impressed with that stuff I was at the time.
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Computers in the 70s and 80s were impressive, they had a real wow factor, special rooms, big, lots of lights and moving bits visible like tapes & disks etc.
Now computers are not impressive, but the things they can do are.
Progress, I guess
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This bloke has proved remarkably prophetic
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
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An acquaintance made a coffee table from an early HDD in the '70s, It was about a metre across.
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If you compare the computing power of a modern, high-end smartphone to early super computers you'll find the phone is more powerful, has more memory and more storage.
Turn it around though, and the super computer clusters of today are pretty powerful. The next US Dept of Energy supers will be about 150 Petaflops* each (they want two). And the cost is over $300 million (for two).
* 1,000 teraflops or 1 quadrillion floating-point operations per second. That's fast.
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Quadrillion! - I rather likes that word! Haven't heard it used alot but twice in this last week!
One thing about Quadrillions though, theres a lot of them! - last week an Astronomer was explaining on T.v how they measure the distance to the moon (down to the last millimeter) by "firing" a pulsed laser at the reflectors that the Apollo missions allegedly left there. Each "pulse" contains four-Quadrillion Photons of which they feel lucky if they receive ONE back. I wonder if they've taken the depth of the actual reflector into the equation when calculating the distance to the surface? (T.I.C)
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The same applies to hard drives. Use to pay around £10 per GB but in recent years that figure has dropped to pennies per GB.
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In 1984 a 10Mb external hard drive unit, containing an HD controller and 10Mb, to a base 2 floppy PC was £2,400+VAT.
In 1987 the cost of a 310Mb hard drive was some £2,200+VAT -so compared to 1984 it was "cheap"
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nowadays we have ssd drives they were expensive when i built my pc, a 128 gb force 3 corsair was retailing for £180, now you can get that for roughly half price, or less such is progress.
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When SSD drives first appeared, they were smaller than 128GB and cost more than £180.
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>> This bloke has proved remarkably prophetic
>>
>> en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law
BTW 50th anniversary yesterday
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Computing Advances - Costs of Memory - Aretas
