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How to equip the Xian Rock?


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Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim
Never trust a computer you can't throw out the window.
Reminds me of a mousepad I saw several years ago now; it had a picture of some angry people ready to toss computer equipment out the window, and a caption that read, "Our office uses Windows."

Originally Posted By: Harehunter
The first computer I worked with was the size of two legal filing cabinets. And that was just the CPU! It took two 40 foot trailer vans to house all the rest of the equipment. This was the most cantankerist machine I've ever worked on.
Was it, by any chance, a UNIVAC? Or was it an ENIAC? Those are the only ones I can think of that were that big, except maybe some kind of mainframe computer.
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It was an IBM 360/30 with a whopping 32Kb of core memory. Card reader/punch and chain printer took up the rest of one trailer, eight disk drive (256Kb each) and six tape drives took up the other trailer.

 

Oh, BTW, did I mention that this was the army's idea of 'Mobile Data Processing'? We actually did operate in a field environment.

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That was back in 1980. What we now know as the PC had not been born yet. The Intel 8080 microprocessor had just been invented and only a few computers used it. Apple and Radio Shack were the only systems that you would recognize as a personal computer. The first Personal Computer (PC) was first available in 1982. The first portable PC (1983) looked like this

678px-Compaq_portable.jpg It was nowhere near being capable of handling the jobs that the 'mainframe' could do. The computer you are working on now is 500 times more powerful than the mainframe of that time, and the computers I work on now are at least 10 times more powerful than that. I have one database that is just shy of one terabyte in size; and that is tiny by comparison to many companies.

Laptop computers are currently being used in the field, but these are models that have been 'ruggedized' to withstand a lot of beating around.

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