The first networked computer I used? Didn't have a monitor.

[demiurgent]

I'm enjoying Leopard. And Time Machine stuns me with just how good it is.

But I just had a weird, almost surreal experience.

It did its thing at 2:30. It was next scheduled to do it at 3:30. At 2:53, I decided "eh, I'm curious how much it'll back up if I do it now," so I opened up the Preferences page so I could watch it copy, and I triggered a copy.

23 minutes after its last copy, it breezily sent over the 28.6 megabytes that had changed.

28.6 megabytes. That's more than one megabyte a minute.

I remember. My first "computer" had a miniscule amount of RAM -- 16k, maybe -- and got its programs off a cassette drive. My first real computer had 128K and a single 5.25" floppy disk drive which pretty much everything ran off of. You had to take the program disks out and slide the storage disks in to save anything.

My mother got a great computer on her desk, just before her retirement. AT&T brand, a 286. It had a 20 megabyte hard drive on it.

I completely filled my mother's hard drive with random changes and shit in less than twenty minutes, and then went over it by almost half-again her space. And I didn't do anything in that time.

Man, every so often I need to be reminded just how different things are now....

Comments

[mishamish.livejournal.com]

I was thinking just the other day about the fact that Terabyte hard-drives are within striking distance now. TERAbyte. Otherwise known as "Four MILLION 5 1/4" floppies."

Four.
MILLION.

It boggles my mind.

[mishamish.livejournal.com]

(I mean, THINK ABOUT IT! If you were going to back up a Terabyte HD on 5 1/4" floppies (and had the time and patience for it), by the time you got through with the last disk, the data on the first disk would have corrupted with age!)

[demiurgent.livejournal.com]

And long before then you would have been driven insane by the terrible farting sound.

[mrbankies.livejournal.com]

1 TB has arrived.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=2010150014+103530090&name=800GB+and+higher

And the price isn't all that outrageous either.

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

I actually just purchased a 750gb drive about an hour ago. I decided the 1tb drive wasn't worth the premium.

Note that it replaces a pair of 500gb drives, but that's two 500gb drives with about 350gb filled with things I can easily archive and ignore. So it's not much of an upgrade, it's mostly just a replacement (and a quieting step, since at least one of the drives is getting rather noisy.)

Meanwhile I'm eagerly awaiting affordable 32gb solid-state drives so I can turn two computers completely-solid-state . . .

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Yay, bloatware! I had my first graphic example of that when I had to convert my thesis from ClarisWorks to Word. In ClarisWorks, it was about 1M. In Word, just converting and no "track all the changes and keep a record of them" stuff, it was 4M.

[rickj.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I had that "wow, do the math" moment a while ago when I realized how many floppies it would have taken to back up the 2 GB flash drive I keep on my keychain.

[ashears.livejournal.com]

As an artist who lives in PhotoShop and who's done some dabbling in video, a meg a minute is nada to me. :) If you want your jaw to drop, go see how much space 5 minutes of captured video footage takes up.

We've had Terabyte HDs in the store for a little while now. They're not in striking distance, they're here, they've been here a bit.

[rabbi-thor.livejournal.com]

Dude, remember the DEC Rainbow?

Eeeehhnn eeeeehn EEEHHN EEEERRRRN EEERRN EHHHRRN ERNNNN EHNNNNNN

[bodhranplayer.livejournal.com]

I remember the DEC.

RRRRRR .... RRRRRR>..... Rrahn

[fmphoenixhawk.livejournal.com]

And RAM chips will reach 4 GB units by the end of Q2 next year, supposedly. My first Pentium comp had a 4 GB hard drive. Sure, it was a secondary drive, but still. Well, the primary drive was also 4 GB. But now, that entire thing could live in RAM on one strip. ONE strip.

Won't be long until the robots try to take over the world. Anyone know where John Conner is?

[zorbathut.livejournal.com]

My graphics card has over an order of magnitude more space than my first hard drive.

My graphics card.

[fmphoenixhawk.livejournal.com]

My first comp was a 486. I was happy with the 40 MB hard drive in it.

[longwing.livejournal.com]

I remember the first time I lobbied for a computer upgrade. I wanted to get a 486/66. Not the 486/33 mind you, it was the /66 or nothing.

I would never, not in a million years, admit that I just wanted to play games. I still have a copy of Fantasy Empires, which lit that fire under me lo those many years ago.

[genchaos.livejournal.com]

I remember back in oh, '95, when gig drives were the Hot Shit. And now, they're in little teeny things the size of your thumb.

My freaking Mini's RAM is *twice* the size of the HD of my late lamented Performa 6116 CD.

Makes ya sweat, donnit?

[westrider.livejournal.com]

Yep. The first computer I used had 64K of RAM, and two 5 1/4" floppy drives. The first hard drive I had was 40 Megs. I was recently given a 2 gig Flash Drive as a freebee. I have something that stores 500 times the capacity of that first drive, and fits in my pocket.

And yep, my friend who works at OMX said they got 1 Terabyte drives in some time this summer, I think. It's crazy.

[bodhranplayer.livejournal.com]

Changed ... I'll say .... I had a migration routine fail last night because a department added 10 to 12 gigabytes to their usage in the last month.

This is my third weekend working on this project ... want to sleep ... but have rehearsal too. *SIGH*

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Of course, a few years back I had a WATCH with more memory than my first computer (32K), and it wasn't even a calculator watch, it just had phone number storage and the like. :) (The watch still works, but the band broke and it's one of those annoying proprietary types you can't get anywhere else and the manufacturer discontinued it.)

[point5b.livejournal.com]

My first box was a TRS-80 MC-10 (http://www.trs-80.com/trs80-models-mc10.htm). 4K of RAM, used a TV as a monitor, had a tape drive, booted into BASIC, and because its keyboard was so small, had BASIC keywords above each key. Hell, many folks' LJ icons are bigger than the RAM it had.

I'm reminded of this beautiful bit of geekery (http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS5804062141.html) I came across - a former Transmeta employee home-brewed his own microcomputer architecture and built something along the lines of a 70s PC...but got Minix and a shell working on it.