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Remember when 2 GBs of Hard Disk Space Was a Lot?


Nioca

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As anyone following the Brigandage thread may know, I've been having some computer problems. Namely, a rattling in my PSU's fan. Good news is, the rattling stopped. Bad news is, so did the fan. So when I found my computer powered down this morning, seemingly of its own accord, I was sure that it was going down for good and that I'd need to find a new computer.

 

Turns out it was just a power outage.

 

But it got me browsing on Newegg and looking at computers and parts for replacing it. And... wow. It's amazing how fast things go obsolete in the computer industry. I mean, this thing was already obsolete when I bought it, but now, it's practically a dinosaur. And it's barely two years old.

 

I mean, wasn't it only a couple of years ago when the most RAM you could have was 4 GBs? Yet now, we have individual sticks that rival that capacity. And now we have individual drives that can hold 2 Terabytes of data each... Not to mention hex-core CPUs. Man, I remember when I had a High-end $2000 Gaming system with... 64 megabytes of RAM! Thing wouldn't even get $20 today...

 

So, a poll. How old and obsolete are your computers?

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oh good a thread in which i can brag about my new computer

 

i had it custom-built and shipped to me earlier this month

 

it's got an outstandingly burly core i5 670 dual-core CPU (if you don't know what specifically you would need more than two cores for, you don't need more than two cores), 1 TB of hard disk space and 4 GB of RAM with room for expansion. oh and the disk drive can read blu-ray disks just in case i ever feel the need to do that. the graphics card is mid-range but i can always update that later

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I bought this computer a bit over a year ago, but within months an upgraded version of it had come out. LOL. Of course, this was still a huge improve over the five-year-old iBook G4 I had at the time. 5 years of use for a computer...is pretty, but one ends up pretty far behind.

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I still have my slide rule from high school. smile

 

You kids are spoiled not having to use DOS 1.0 on 180 kB floppy disks and having to swap them out every few minutes. Or the older cassette tape drives or even more fragile paper tape drives where a single typo meant retyping the whole program over again.

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I remember having a computer with DOS (though probably not 1.0) growing up. I also remember Windows 3.1 (and thinking DOS was so much better). And I remember being wowed by Windows 95. Weird.

 

My grandpa actually worked on computers back in the day when they took up whole rooms...it's staggering to think the average cell phone may be more powerful than those computers now...to say nothing of a laptop...or an iPhone, for an even more staggering size/capability contrast.

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My current computer is an '07 MBP.

 

First computer was a Macintosh IIvi or a IIvx; I don't remember which one off the top of my head but I think it was a vi because it didn't have a cd player built in. We bought that separately. I remember I got in trouble when I downloaded escape velocity onto the computers hard drive because it took up so much space. That was also the computer that I used to play Exile on.

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Well, which computer? The only one I actually own is approaching ten years old, an iMac G4 700 MHz with only 30 GB of disk space and 512 MB of RAM. The thing still runs the games we put on it back then, of course, but we haven't installed a new program of any kind on it in years.

 

What I mostly use, though, are a Power Mac dual G5 that still crunches along quite nicely, and in fact just coughed up a funky chaotic Poincaré section for me in about 15 minutes, and a maxed out late 2009 MBP. The MBP only has 256 GB of storage, but it's SSD.

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My desktop fit in the 'obsolete' category, but it really isn't -- it does exactly what it's supposed to do. A lot of companies need nothing more than greenscreen dumb terminals to do their work, and decades-old mainframes are still in use. Just because something better is out doesn't make it obsolete.

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"brand" newish C2Q with 4GB memory and Radeon 4870 PCI-E graphic card and 320GB SATA2-hd for os and progs (160 GB to both) and 2 IDE-hds from 80GB to 120GB and normal DVD-burner which can burn dl-discs if needed (last 3 parts from old comp which was bought used and was basicaly 12 years old but still ran A5 well).

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What amazes ne isn't so muchtye amount of memory that is an a desktop, but the amount of storage thAt can be on tine, tiny devices. I think that there 1TB SD cards out there. I can store more memory Ina chip that's smaller than a fifty-cent piece (bet most of you don't know what that is. Back in the day, we could get an ice cream for a nickel, after walking five miles to school uphill both ways) than there is in the entire Library of Congress.

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Originally Posted By: Dantius
What amazes ne isn't so muchtye amount of memory that is an a desktop, but the amount of storage thAt can be on tine, tiny devices. I think that there 1TB SD cards out there. I can store more memory Ina chip that's smaller than a fifty-cent piece (bet most of you don't know what that is. Back in the day, we could get an ice cream for a nickel, after walking five miles to school uphill both ways) than there is in the entire Library of Congress.


fun fact: the spaces between circuit components in the latest generation of CPUs are a little over a hundred atoms across
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Originally Posted By: Lilith
fun fact: the spaces between circuit components in the latest generation of CPUs are a little over a hundred atoms across


Aren't computers slated to start running into problems with the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle in under a decade? Like, we can't know if a switch is on or off because it's so small?
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Originally Posted By: Lilith
we're definitely approaching the quantum scale. with current designs, quantum effects are starting to become an issue in various ways. we're already working on ways to use them to our advantage, eg. the memristor


Click to reveal..
2mmitk3.png

(In case you can't read the pillars, one reads "Position" and the other reads "Momentum".)
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Originally Posted By: Fractal
Someone told me that Intel strips their factories and sells them every two years because the technology is already too outdated to use. And what was that theorem that predicted the growth of technology in a linear pattern?

MOORES LAW: memory size doubles every two years
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Originally Posted By: Darth Ernie
Originally Posted By: Fractal
Someone told me that Intel strips their factories and sells them every two years because the technology is already too outdated to use. And what was that theorem that predicted the growth of technology in a linear pattern?

MOORES LAW: memory size doubles every two years


Moore's law states that the number of transistors that can be placed on a circuit doubles every two years.

Here's a nice graph set to a logarithmic scale:

Here.

EDIT: Couldn't get the image to work.
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Your analysis doesn't really work for laptops. Mine's just two years old, which puts it solidly in the modern category (or, in your terms, obsolete). But its hard drive certainly isn't a terabyte and it has one core because it's a MacBook Pro.

 

—Alorael, who has no trouble getting his computer to do everything he wants it to do (and then some). He can currently save a lot on a new computer, though, so he's tempted to upgrade for the sake of upgrading. At least then he could have a computer not dropped on its head as a baby (physical damage only).

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Yeah, I know. At any rate, that's just to provide an idea of what each category means, rather than just undefined terms.

 

Plus, it was made with UBBPollmaker. Sucky polls is right there in the legal text:

Quote:
At the discretion of the software, all polls created with UBBPollmaker can be suckified without consent of the owner.

See? tongue

 

Anyway, my current computer's a 2.8 GHz P4 with 1.3 GBs of RAM and a 37 GB Hard Disk. Sound and graphics are built-in to the motherboard, so there's no sound or graphics card. Oh, and a metric crapton of USB ports. Definitely slipping near the long-obsolete category.

 

Also, it's one of those tiny compact desktop computers. Next computer? Definitely going to be a mid- or full-tower. There's hardly any room to work in there...

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Originally Posted By: Sylvan Amble
Your analysis doesn't really work for laptops. Mine's just two years old, which puts it solidly in the modern category (or, in your terms, obsolete). But its hard drive certainly isn't a terabyte and it has one core because it's a MacBook Pro.


It does? Huh. My MacBook is from 2007 and it's a Core 2 Duo. I thought they all were.
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Oh, the things I could write in this thread.... *pauses to wax nostalgic* Maybe I'll just let you all wait for the novel. tongue

 

In the meantime, I voted "2 years" (though I probably should've voted "3-5 years") and "Obsolete" (but only 100GB hard drive, and currently about 1/3 empty) for my computer. Here's the specs. The keyboard is starting to go bad, and one of the USB ports isn't reading right, so I'm considering getting a new computer (a desktop this time), and building it instead of buying a pre-built system.

Originally Posted By: Lilith
also my new computer is literally held together with duct tape because the case got damaged slightly in transit
You know, that gives me an idea: Instead of buying a case, maybe I'll build one out of 1/4" plywood.

Originally Posted By: waterplant
Originally Posted By: Darth Ernie
MOORES LAW: memory size doubles every two years
waterplant's law: memory size halves every two years.
The Mystic's law: memory required by your system increases tenfold with each new software version.
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Originally Posted By: Randomizer
I still have my slide rule from high school. smile
I bought an old slide rule in an antique shop when I was a teenager. Taught myself how to do basic arithmetic on it, too.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer
You kids are spoiled not having to use DOS 1.0 on 180 kB floppy disks and having to swap them out every few minutes. Or the older cassette tape drives or even more fragile paper tape drives where a single typo meant retyping the whole program over again.
Two words: punched cards. tongue
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I used a slide rule for a while, too. Man, the games on that platform were great. Unimpressive graphics by today's standards, of course, but the stories and the strategies were so deep and complex. Then along came shallow eye candy vehicles like Rogue, and a whole art form died.

 

Actually, that was the early 1980s, and I was only using my dad's old slide rule as a joke in high school. Slide rules work, all right, but how accurate your answer is can depend on how well you can squint at the little lines. That's analog computation for you.

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Hmm, well I got my computer about 5 years ago, but I have incrementally replaced the motherboard, the RAM, the video card (twice), the cpu, and even the PSU. The original 200GB hard drive is still in it, but I also purchased a 350gb external HD to supplement my storage.

 

Incrementally improving the components seems like a better option than buying a whole new rig in one go. Its easier on the wallet, and everything doesn't go obsolete in one big hit.

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Originally Posted By: Randomizer
Originally Posted By: The Mystic
Two words: punched cards. tongue


I still got a box of them in case I need shims. smile
My father still has a few floating around too. It's only natural, since he's a retired COBOL programmer (and no, he didn't use punched cards the whole time; just until the late 70's or early 80's, I think).
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