WOW !!

Having problems installing that new stick of memory? Found some great software or having issues with something? Or maybe want to chat about your PlayStation, X-Box, Nintendo, Sega, even your old Spectrum 48k....! Or maybe something you want to sell or acquire (computing related of course!). Let us know here...
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UBT - Timbo
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WOW !!

Post by UBT - Timbo »

Hi all

It's been a while since I had a truly big "WOW" moment, but today is one of those days.

But first some "back story" over the last 30 years !!.

I bought my first PC back in 1988, which had a 12 MHz 80286 CPU, 1Mb of RAM, an orange monochrome monitor, a Hercules graphics card and a 5 1/4" high density (ie 1.2Mb) floppy drive, which ran MSDOS 5. I got it for work, as my firm wouldn't buy me one !!

This had some limitations but I could run "MS Word 5.5" and "As-Easy-As" (a Lotus 123 clone) from the floppy and all was well.

I needed some more storage and faster access, so a hard drive was acquired soon after - a 5 1/4" Seagate 20Mb MFM drive and a ISA-bus controller to go with it. That cost me about £300 !!

Fast forward a wee bit, and over time, a second MFM drive was bought (a 40 Mb) and then a colour monitor, a CDROM drive and then various upgraded parts as PCs were (and still are) basically modular so you can replace various parts as you upgrade.

But I digress....

The 40 Mb MFM drive was replaced with a 270 Mb SCSI drive (for about £400), and Adaptec AHA2742 SCSI controller - and as you can have up to 7 SCSI devices, so I added more SCSI hard drives (540 MB) as well as a rather neat Panasonic optical read/write drive (for backing up).

In time, a stack of SCSI drives wasn't enough, so I changed to IDE and got a 1.2 Gb drive... :-)

And over time, that has been upgraded too and my home PC now has a 3.5" 500 GB HDD and my work PC has a 3.5" 1 Tb HDD. I also have a nice Synology RAID5 NAS box for my ripped CDs - that's about 8 Tb.

-------------------------------------------

And now back to today:

I've just read a report about some new SSD devices, which when they become available will just kill off spinning rust type hard drives.

The first, available by mid-2019, are 2.5" 64 Tb SSDs from Samsung, using "96-layer QLC 3D NAND with a 1Tbit die size".

The second, designed by Nimbus, are 2.5" 100 Tb SSDs using MLC (2bits/cell) planar (2D) flash. They will have a SATA interface.

Of course, these will be expensive and designed for enterprise level servers and the like.

But the article states:
After 96 layers, the flash foundry operators have 128-layer NAND coming. If they manage this technology transition, then 100 TB small form factor PCs are theoretically possible.
This is proper scary stuff... 100 Tb of storage on a PC !!


The full story can be read here:

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/1 ... 100tb_ssd/


So, what with multi-threaded CPUs, plenty of RAM and mega-Tb storage, the ability of these PCs is going to be staggering.

Mind you - lots of people will just use them for playing games :roll:

regards
Tim
Jeffers
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Re: WOW !!

Post by Jeffers »

Yep, the technology changes over the years have been amazing.

I'm retired now, and apart from a couple of years in the merchant navy on leaving school, my careers were in electronics and such.

I trained on radio and tv servicing, when it was all valves and individual components. Moved into a data storage job which at the time was on punch card machines. They then got high-tech with 8 inch floppy disc storage, which might have been about 100kb capacity maximum.

Next was on mainframe computers, initial range I worked on was all diode/transistor logic, not a chip in sight!

Next generation was logic chip based, but very basic, just 8-bit chips, about 20 or so to a circuit board and literally hundreds of boards making up the computer. Also saw advances in storage. Just before I started they'd got rid of the last drum storage, which comprised a spinning cylinder with lots of read/write heads in a row across it. The first removable hard drives arrived, 7 layers of 15 inch diameter discs which packed in 100mb of data!
The computer and it's storage filled quite a large room. Things advanced rapidly over the years, there was always something bigger (or should I say, more powerful but smaller!) and better coming along. It's 10 years since I retired from that trade, so I reckon it's moved on even more since then...

At home it was a similar picture. Started with Sinclair ZX81, then various machines along the way, Spectrum, Atari, BBC micro etc. First PC was an Intel 386 cpu based machine. I remember paying about a £1,000 for a Pentium based PC, running at 90Mhz. I've lost track of the various stages that have gotten me to my latest rig, which I had built for me as a treat for my 65th birthday. Had it a while now so it's probably getting a bit behind the latest technology, but it still does all I want, so it'll do for now.....

Thanks Tim for the trip down memory lane...

P.S. I went for a visit to the National Computing museum at Bletchley a few years ago, and it was scary how much of the stuff I recognised and thought "I used to work on those...."
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UBT - Timbo
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Re: WOW !!

Post by UBT - Timbo »

Hi Jeff,

Nice memories :-

I, too, started originally on a ZX81, my cheap Vesta tape recorder and a 16kb "RAMPack" (which did indeed "wobble") and then my brother caught the bug and got a 48k ZX Spectrum; he got bored with playing "Manic Miner" after a while and gave it to me.

I paired that up with a VTX5000 modem and started getting into Prestel and chatting with "TAs" (travel agents) about all their freebie trips abroad courtesy of the tour operators. Ah, such fun times...and all via dial up at 1200/75 half duplex lol

When I worked for one company, they were using HP 5451A Fast Fourier machines, bought second hand from the US Navy and which had about 16kb of "bubble" memory. All the programming was done in machine code...and the machines were 5 feet tall and 19" wide - they had 4 of them...2 used for R&D and 2 for production.

https://retrovoltage.com/2015/07/27/the ... -analyzer/

My, times change so much...

regards
Tim
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