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In 1991 the Army unit I was assigned to was getting modernized -- instead of paper maps, transparencies and grease pencils we were going the way of digital terr
by MrZongle2 7y ago
In 1991 the Army unit I was assigned to was getting modernized -- instead of paper maps, transparencies and grease pencils we were going the way of digital terrain data and maps via some custom software running on SPARCstations. I was particularly blown away by the large hard drive one of the contractors showed me -- a 20+ pound behemoth that had a whopping 1 Gigabyte of storage. At the time I had an Amiga 500 with two floppy drives, which paled in comparison.
Seeing a commercially-available 1Tb SD card amazes me in the same manner.
- cr0sh 7y agoAs someone who's first computer was an 8-bit machine with only 16k of RAM - and a cassette tape drive for storage (all circa 1984)... ...well, this is kinda neat.
- bradknowles 7y agoMy first computer was a Commodore Vic-20, with 5KB of RAM and we splurged hundreds of dollars for the cassette tape drive. I think that was 1982 or maybe 1983. Years later, I worked for Imprimis (since bought by Seagate), and I worked closely with the manufacturing engineer responsible for the Wren VII line of hard drives. Those were the first consumer-grade SCSI hard drives that had 1GB of raw storage. I've still got some of the magnet fragments taken from some of the early drives that came off the line. Those damn things can't be removed from your refrigerator just by pulling on them -- they're too strong. You can only slide them, or tip them, and hope you don't get your fingers caught. We've come a long way.