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5MB of 1965 disk storage, as the article helpfully points out, stores 5 million (EBCDIC) characters of text. 5MB of 2024 storage, stores 5 million (ASCII) or a
by samatman 2y ago
5MB of 1965 disk storage, as the article helpfully points out, stores 5 million (EBCDIC) characters of text.
5MB of 2024 storage, stores 5 million (ASCII) or as little as 1.25 million (UTF-8) characters of text.
There's no inflation to adjust here. There are still people programming microcontrollers with 1KiB or 512 bytes of RAM, 4KiB EEPROM, and maybe 1MB Flash. Those computers can do about the same things which 1965 computers with the same specs can do, just 20-100 times faster. Just because we don't use an AVR to add up Olympic scores, doesn't mean we couldn't.
The ones with five orders of magnitude more resources do a lot more. Some of it is squandered, when we can afford to do that, but in applications like AAA gaming or simulation, not so much. They operate near-optimally, just much faster, and doing a great deal more than was possible at the time.