Moore's Law

[MikeKardec]

Uploading, literally, the first five megabyte hard disk, 1956.

 

[Zombie_61]

Wouldn't it be easier if that guy turned the forklift around?

 

[philosophygirl78]

Im pretty sure the 'observation' is being disproven in the tech stock sector of late too... Getting clobbered.

Assembly at site of delivery may have been an option for the air guys too.

 

[Tiki Tom]

Great photo. It still amazes me how quickly (from the viewpoint of consumers) the "IT Age" arrived. Thinking back on it, it seems like personal computers, cell phones and the internet tumbled upon us in a great rush and the world changed almost over night. I know it didn't happen quite that quickly. But in hindsight it seems like it did. I'm not sure my teenaged daughter completely believes me when I tell her that, when I first started at university, term-papers and reports were still done on a typewriter. Every once in a while I try to imagine what technology will be like 60 years from now.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I get the same reaction when I explain to the kids I work with that I was born into a world of manual typewriters, manual telephones, vacuum tube electronics, Brownie cameras, and refrigerators you had to defrost. So give me a damn break when I don't understand how to take a picture with your iphone.

 

[Fading Fast]

I get the same reaction when I explain to the kids I work with that I was born into a world of manual typewriters, manual telephones, vacuum tube electronics, Brownie cameras, and refrigerators you had to defrost. So give me a damn break when I don't understand how to take a picture with your iphone.

I'm not proud of this, but one fun thing to witnesses is that some of the kids we hired in the late '90s who where whizbang* tech gurus then and made fun of us 30+ year olds, at the time, for struggling with the new technology are now getting the same treatment today from the just-out-of-college kids who are more up to date on the technology curve than they are. What comes around goes around.

*Note to self, must post "whizbang" in "Terms Which Are Disappearing" thread.

 

[MikeKardec]

Great photo. It still amazes me how quickly (from the viewpoint of consumers) the "IT Age" arrived. Thinking back on it, it seems like personal computers, cell phones and the internet tumbled upon us in a great rush and the world changed almost over night. I know it didn't happen quite that quickly. But in hindsight it seems like it did. I'm not sure my teenaged daughter completely believes me when I tell her that, when I first started at university, term-papers and reports were still done on a typewriter. Every once in a while I try to imagine what technology will be like 60 years from now.

I'm guessing we'll go from wear-ables to surgically implanted systems. Imagine having your eyelid view screens hacked! Not for me. Cyberneticly and mechanically enhanced humans may be the upper or dominant class, a whole step up from having the wherewithal to get a good education. I'm guessing that the military might be the place where people went to get an upgrade they couldn't afford otherwise, a technology oriented GI Bill. I assume that apps could replace recreational drugs if the system was adequately integrated with the nervous system. That's sort of sick but there might be health benefits as well.

It's interesting to watch Halt and Catch Fire an excellent AMC series about some minor players in the early days of the personal computer business for some perspective.

I get the same reaction when I explain to the kids I work with that I was born into a world of manual typewriters, manual telephones, vacuum tube electronics, Brownie cameras, and refrigerators you had to defrost. So give me a damn break when I don't understand how to take a picture with your iphone.

While producing one of our educational symposiums I was driving around Atlanta one night with another guy and one of our students, the 16 year old daughter of a microsoft executive in the car. Brilliant kid, she could gut your cell phone or laptop and return it running better than before. Photographic memory, she navigated us across a town she'd never been in before better than a GPS. We were talking about old technology and she loved vacuum tube stereos (I guess her dad had one) and wasn't thrown by how antiquated that was BUT ...

When we mentioned rotary telephones she had no clue what we were talking about and when we described one to her and how it communicated with the phone system in general she just laughed and laughed. Like hysteria. Like "I can't believe doctors used leaches" or that people once thought that a dragon ate the moon every month.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Try telling them that when you were born, your mother was a switchboard operator on a phone exchange where you had to give her the number you wanted to reach ever time you needed to make a call. It's something utterly incomprehensible.

 

[Fading Fast]

^^^ When I started on Wall Street, some firms still moved trade tickets internally via pneumatic tubes and conveyor belts (see photo below). Today, obviously, it's all done electronic. And I started in the '80s, there just wasn't a lot of better technology, so firms just kept using what worked twenty and thirty years before (and longer). When I tell this to twenty and thirty year olds today, they half believe you, half think you are crazy.

 

[Zombie_61]

Mention "carbon paper" to anyone under the age of 30, and watch their heads spin.

 

[BobHufford]

Uploading, literally, the first five megabyte hard disk, 1956.

This should fit ...

Stack of 62,500 punched cards 5 MB worth, holding the control program for the giant SAGE military computer network. 1955.

I remember using punch cards in my first computer class in college ... and this was as recent as 1979. Well, it seems recent anyway.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I remember voting for the Baseball All-Star teams in 1970, and it was a very big deal that year -- the balloting was COMPUTERIZED. You'd pick up a punch-card ballot at your favorite store selling Gillette products, poke out the hole next to the players you liked, and drop the postpaid cards into any mailbox where they'd be counted by COMPUTER.

I also remember thinking how dumb the whole COMPUTER thing was, because the way the cards were set up made stuffing the ballot incredibly easy. A bunch of us got handfuls of ballots from the drug store and sat around the table punching out votes for Red Sox players. You could take a stack of a dozen cards at a time and line them up and using a sharp pencil poke out all the holes next to Rico Petrocelli's name all at once.

I'm pretty sure a few election wardens in Florida started out that way.

 

[Fading Fast]

I remember voting for the Baseball All-Star teams in 1970, and it was a very big deal that year -- the balloting was COMPUTERIZED. You'd pick up a punch-card ballot at your favorite store selling Gillette products, poke out the hole next to the players you liked, and drop the postpaid cards into any mailbox where they'd be counted by COMPUTER.

I also remember thinking how dumb the whole COMPUTER thing was, because the way the cards were set up made stuffing the ballot incredibly easy. A bunch of us got handfuls of ballots from the drug store and sat around the table punching out votes for Red Sox players. You could take a stack of a dozen cards at a time and line them up and using a sharp pencil poke out all the holes next to Rico Petrocelli's name all at once.

I'm pretty sure a few election wardens in Florida started out that way.

I remember that too - both the cards and the multiple voting (we did that as kids too). In the end, it's a popularity contest, so maybe the stuffing the ballot box thing still reflects the most popular or the players with the most passionate fans. Not such a big deal for an All-Star game; definitely a big deal for a Presidential election.

 

[ingineer]

Unsung hero or is heroine propper
from wiki
Margaret Hamilton standing next to listings of the actual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code
70 pounds of ancient computer
"1202" no problem

 

[LizzieMaine]

I remember that too - both the cards and the multiple voting (we did that as kids too). In the end, it's a popularity contest, so maybe the stuffing the ballot box thing still reflects the most popular or the players with the most passionate fans. Not such a big deal for an All-Star game; definitely a big deal for a Presidential election.

Amazingly, or perhaps not so, there was a rather elaborate baseball ballot-stuffing scandal in 1975. I never thought of using a power drill.

 

[MikeKardec]

I think it was Neal Stevenson who called early hackers ... "clackers." Cute and appropriate.

And I love those tubes ... my old VW dealer had them in a building that was not very old. I always thought they'd be great for delivering hot dogs from a drive up stand. The soft drinks would be problematic, however.

 

[Zombie_61]

...Margaret Hamilton standing next to listings of the actual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code...

Funny, she doesn't look wicked.

 

[JimWagner]

When I first started out in computer programming in 1970 it was all punched cards and green bar paper. We still had some wired board equipment - sorters, 407 accounting machines, etc. Mainframe memory was under 256 Kb. State of the art disk drives were IBM 2314's at 29 Mb per removable disk pack and the whole 8-pack unit came to a whopping 233 Mb. I still remember the first time we had a whole gigabye of disk storage (IBM 3330 drives) and it filled up a room the size of a large auditorium. Computer rooms took up whole building floors - or more likely basements.

Today I have 6 terrabytes of disk storage sitting behind one of my monitors here at home in less than 1 cubic foot of space. My cell phone has more actual computing power than the largest mainframe I ever worked on as little as 10 years ago.

What do most people do with all that raw power? Answer - Facebook.

 

[Mr. Pickett]

I've never known a world without mass technology. I was born in 1995, and the most primitive form I remember is dial up internet, and I remember that going pretty quickly.

I recently bought myself a typewriter, which I love using, far more so than a computer keyboard. Though that could still be the novelty of it.

I work in a shop, and for the past 6-7 months have primarily used a fountain pen when I write. I continously receive comments from people - how should I put this - of an older generation who say how nice it is to see a fountain pen being used, and how they remember being taught to use them when they were at school.

And just for the record - I know what carbon paper is.

Edit: Though good luck using it with a fountain pen.

 

[MikeKardec]

When I first started out in computer programming in 1970 it was all punched cards and green bar paper. We still had some wired board equipment - sorters, 407 accounting machines, etc. Mainframe memory was under 256 Kb. State of the art disk drives were IBM 2314's at 29 Mb per removable disk pack and the whole 8-pack unit came to a whopping 233 Mb. I still remember the first time we had a whole gigabye of disk storage (IBM 3330 drives) and it filled up a room the size of a large auditorium. Computer rooms took up whole building floors - or more likely basements.

Today I have 6 terrabytes of disk storage sitting behind one of my monitors here at home in less than 1 cubic foot of space. My cell phone has more actual computing power than the largest mainframe I ever worked on as little as 10 years ago.

What do most people do with all that raw power? Answer - Facebook.

You guys had to write with impressive efficiency, I remember using an Atari rejiggered to be an audio editing computer (one of the first) in the mid 1980s. If we went into the code and turned off the color for the start up screen we'd get more "recording time" going from something like 40 seconds of 44.1 16 bit stereo to maybe 45 seconds ... believe it or not we built a lot of sound effects on that damn thing.