How far we've come in thirty years

[Wadenut]

While upgrading the firmware in my IP cameras yesterday (an annual project here as most of the Wi-Fi cams are mounted outdoors and have to be taken down and brought to the bench), I removed the SD cards from them to use elsewhere. I use FTP with the cameras now and no longer require the internal storage. It occurred to me that in 1985 I bought my first Hard Disk. It was a full sized 5" drive. The machine was a home built Z80 based unit running CP/M (actually by that time I was running ZRDOS/ZCPR) with four 5" floppy drives. There was no built in support for the hard drive, so I had to spend the next month learning how to, and writing drivers for the disk.

The new hard disk stored a whopping 20 MegaBytes of data and cost me $650, plus the cost of the HD controller (I think it was about $300).

These 32 GigaByte Micro SD cards cost about $10 each, and are smaller than my thumbnail.

[Eman]

Interesting!

It's been a while now since an interesting topic was brought up in the general discussion and about technology. You could also have added this : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor..._to_the_PC_era to compliment it but there is also this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh-je6GWCfA and many more about where we are heading! The future is................................


Eman.

[Wadenut]

I think you just did. I'd resisted moving from my favorite CP/M to MS-Dos and the "PC" because I saw them as painfully slow, especially in booting, and prohibitively expensive. I was able to actually hack my CP/M S100 buss machine.
Come to think of it, yes, I did use tape in those days for backup. It was fascinating to watch that tape rushing back and forth writing the data.

My foray into the personal computer goes back to the '70s in fact with my home built Super Elf computer, based on a CDP1802 processor. I knew it's machine code inside out.
Built my first modem for it, buying a surplus acoustic coupler and building the interface up using a UART.
That machine started out with 256 Bytes of memory, which I'd expanded to 16K, and was originally programmed manually with a Hex keypad.
I bought an Assembler and Disassembler intended for another computer based on the same chip. Had to manually disassemble those to change port assignments, etc. then manually reassemble the assembler in order to continue. Later too, found a Basic interpreter (also hacked) to use with it. Added a rudimentary video card and monitor/keyboard. No disks for that machine. Storage was two audio cassette recorders, on to read, the other to write. Had to build the relay interface for those to start/stop the recorders.

Before that, circa 1975, I had access to a University computer, a PDP11, through a terminal, on which I'd taught myself Basic and Fortran. Storage of my programs was either a printout, or Paper Tape. I still have a box full of those rolls of tape somewhere.

Little anecdote there: One day I was experimenting with connecting to and using the University's Line Printer across town. Got a call from the Systems Manager. It seems they had had an Ascii graphic picture of Snoopy print in the middle of their Payroll run. He was NOT impressed, but wasn't long fixing that loophole (among some others I'd discovered just by reading the Systems manuals). A little information in my hands went a long way.

[Wade]

Little anecdote there: One day I was experimenting with connecting to and using the University's Line Printer across town. Got a call from the Systems Manager. It seems they had had an Ascii graphic picture of Snoopy print in the middle of their Payroll run. He was NOT impressed, but wasn't long fixing that loophole (among some others I'd discovered just by reading the Systems manuals). A little information in my hands went a long way.

Great story.

There was some amazing ascii art back in the day before it was auto generated.