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I graduated high school 1980. Started taking mainframe computer classes in 1981, family got an original IBM PC when they came out. What repeatedly blows my mind

I graduated high school 1980. Started taking mainframe computer classes in 1981, family got an original IBM PC when they came out. What repeatedly blows my mind is the expansion of storage. A 300 Megabyte removable CDC hard drive was the size of a washing machine. Nothing was a gigabyte anything, the largest drive in the whole place was a 900 Meg beast. I used to have a keychain with a collection of <8G drives and i'd estimate how much more storage on my keychain compared to my data center. With the large flash drives I'm getting, I estimate that the flash drive collection with higher capacity drives (the smallest they stock in the supply cabinet at work is 32G) has more storage than my entire backup tape vault in 1987 and there is probably as much duplicated data in both.

dublin 4y ago
My (formerly) $55 Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB has more memory, more storage, more compute power, and more network speed than the Cray X/MP I worked with in the early '90s... Don't tell me you need a bigger, faster computer. You need software that's not morbidly obese.
- cosmodisk 4y ago
  We used to have this joke when I was a kid: a new Russian arrives to a computer store in his S600 Mercedes. He ask for the top specs, with multiple processors, SCSI hard drives, UPS and what not. While the sales rep is packing all the gear, the Russian is still somewhat not satisfied. He looks deep down in to the sales rep's eyes and says: are you absolutely 100% certain I'll be able to play Tetris on this????