[COMPUTERS] How far we've come.

[Starwhip]

My dad showed me a magazine for computer deals from god knows when, and they have 26-pound portable computers with built-in thermal printers, some nice CRT 300 by 120 pixel displays, and a 10 megabyte hard drive for the Apple IIc:

A convenient way to store more than 65 floppies... Best of all, it has a suggested retail price of only $1,995!

Ten megabytes.

My Intel i7 laptop with 600 gigabytes of storage and 8 gigs of ram cost only $550, roughly.

What would happen if we took my laptop back in time to, say, 1969, when the Apollo program was underway? Considering that Apollo had less capability than your average smartphone, it should be an interesting experience.

My friends and I have always joked that we could be arrested, the laptop would be confiscated by the government, who would disassemble it to no avail.

Edited February 5, 2015 by Starwhip
"by" makes more sense.

[TheCanadianVendingMachine]

300 BY 120?!

What is this. Madness.

[Norpo]

What would happen if we took my laptop back in time to, say, 1969, when the Apollo program was underway? Considering that Apollo had less capability than your average smartphone, it should be an interesting experience.

People: "What is this? It's storing giant pictures! With brilliant resolution! Thousands of them! And what is this you're doing, a high-tech rocket simulation?"

You: "Uh, this is Kerbal Space Program. It's a game."

[Bill Phil]

Remember ENIAC?

30 tons, taking up a ROOM.

That was the 1940s.

The 80s had computers that could fit on a desk...

2015 has computers that are better, stronger, faster and can leap tall buildings in a single bound!~

[RocketPilot573]

300 BY 120?!

What is this. Madness.

Don' worry, I'm sure Starwhip meant 3000 by 1200. Right? Right?

[Starwhip]

Let them play Skyrim, or fool with the webcam. I could make a fortune.

Or I could show them the calculation speed... holy crud.

"Here, watch me do these math problems!"

1 second later

"Okay, that's 1,000,000 logarithms!"

XD

- - - Updated - - -

Oh, here's a great one!

... can display up to eight different colors simultaneously, without losing any resolution!

[Randox]

My parents have a timex sinclair that I've had the pleasure of using a couple times. It has no permanent storage (though you can plug it into a tape recorder and pray that it will be able to read that back properly in the future), and with the additional memory module I think she has 16kb of RAM. For a monitor, you find a very old black and white TV and hook it up (have fun doing this with a TV made after 1990. Thing uses a connection older than coax). We have a couple manuals for it that include some programs you can enter into it, including a fair few games (this wasn't the dark ages, computers could be fun too).

No, to really hit close to home for me though, I have to think of the PC my parents got when I was in grade 3 I think.I actually found a youtube video with what looks like the same computer, and seems to be fairly similar. Ours was probably 60mb RAM, 350 MHz processor, floppy and zip drive, 10GB HDD, no GPU. I remember that at the time, it was a pretyt fast machine, much better than the school computers or anything my friends had. I also remember how massive that 10GB and later 40GB HDD was, and now I think about how my current PC with 12 GB of RAM could have loaded the entire HDD of that computer into memory in addition to windows.

I think we used that computer until 2002 when I finally got my own, much better, computer with a top end AMD excalibur card.

The chain of computers for me is surprisingly short. I used the 2002 PC for...well it was supplemented with a second hand laptop in 2005. The laptop was not stronger than the PC. At some point in there the PC fried it's GPU randomly, and got a new one. I got a new laptop 2007, and it was marginally more powerful than the PC and took over as my main computer. I guess I used that for 3 years until I got an HP h8-1011 in 2010, and basically at the start of 2015 I finished most of my upgrades into the lovely computer I have now.

It's not that many jumps. Discounting the first laptop because it was barely an upgrade, I've used only 5 computers counting the one I have now (and the upgrade as a new machine, since it basically is). In the span of 5 computers, I've gone from the specs I listed above to a computer with a quad 3.5 GHz processor, 12 GB RAM, 4.25 TB of permanent storage, and a GPU capable of 2.7 TFLOPS (single precision).

If I could take this machine back to 1998, it would be beyond a supercomputer. My younger self wouldn't have been able to comprehend how mind numbingly powerful this machine is vs the one my family had, or what I could possibly be doing with it that would require such power. I mean, the computer back then used less electricity than a 60W light bulb, and the one sitting under my desk now will draw probably 500W if you ask it nicely.

The other one I think about is the internet. Now, the internet existed before it was born, but it didn't become mainstream until the late 90's, at least, not relevant to my life until then. I would obviously have a slightly different perspective on the development of the internet if I had been an adult during that time instead of in elementry, but instead I get to honestly remember a time before the internet mattered. I think that's kind of cool.

Another one to think about. They make Mini SD cards that are about the size of my thumbnail in at least 32GB sizes off the top of my head, and I think 64 by now. And the phone in my pocket has more power than at least my first computer, and my tablet has more processing power than my 2002 PC. It's freaky.

Edited February 5, 2015 by Randox

[Camacha]

What would happen if we took my laptop back in time to, say, 1969, when the Apollo program was underway? Considering that Apollo had less capability than your average smartphone

Smartphones are actually pretty powerful devices. I think the average car ignition system has a more powerful computer than the Apollo craft.

[GoSlash27]

First computer I learned to program was a Texas Instruments TI-99.

Yeah, I'm old...

Best,

-Slashy

[Brethern]

My dad showed me a magazine for computer deals from god knows when, and they have 26-pound portable computers with built-in thermal printers, some nice CRT 300 by 120 pixel displays, and a 10 megabyte hard drive for the Apple IIc:

Ten megabytes.

My Intel i7 laptop with 600 gigabytes of storage and 8 gigs of ram cost only $550, roughly.

What would happen if we took my laptop back in time to, say, 1969, when the Apollo program was underway? Considering that Apollo had less capability than your average smartphone, it should be an interesting experience.

My friends and I have always joked that we could be arrested, the laptop would be confiscated by the government, who would disassemble it to no avail.

They would be limited by the tech of their time, they might figure out how it works but then they would have to invent the tech required to produce it.

Also here's an interesting sci fi fact,

Lt Cmdr Data is listed as being able to perform 60 trillion operations per second making him an impressive 60,000 times faster than the fastest computers in 1989.

Now the fastest computers perform 34 petaflops, 500 times faster.

You'd think for such a "progressive" show they wouldn't have put a number on his upper limit, or would have make it his lower limit or something.

[lajoswinkler]

My dad showed me a magazine for computer deals from god knows when, and they have 26-pound portable computers with built-in thermal printers, some nice CRT 300 by 120 pixel displays, and a 10 megabyte hard drive for the Apple IIc:

Ten megabytes.

My Intel i7 laptop with 600 gigabytes of storage and 8 gigs of ram cost only $550, roughly.

What would happen if we took my laptop back in time to, say, 1969, when the Apollo program was underway? Considering that Apollo had less capability than your average smartphone, it should be an interesting experience.

My friends and I have always joked that we could be arrested, the laptop would be confiscated by the government, who would disassemble it to no avail.

Ten megabytes was more than enough back then. There wasn't anything an average Joe could fit on such disc that would take that much space, and there certainly wasn't anything he could use that would require more processing power.

For the software and data back then, those storages were perfectly fine, just like 20 GB discs were fine for the time when people were having trouble downloading quality MP3 files and 650 MB AVI movies were spread around on CDs.

Smartphones are grossly more powerful than the Apollo computer. They have processing capacities comparable to late 90s quality PCs. Apollo guidance computer is weaker than a simple scientific calculator, and I'm not talking about the ones with graphical interface and data plotting. Luckily for the astronauts, that's pretty much all you need for a decently safe trip.

[StrandedonEarth]

Jeez, when I think back to my first "modern" (Win95) pc. 32MB RAM. 1.3 GB HDD. My motto at the time was "I was sad that I have a pentium 100, until I met the man with a 486." It could barely handle a major battle in StarCraft.

[segaprophet]

Speaking of storage capacity -

Each one of these cabinets is a hard drive, an IBM 350 Disk File. It was introduced in 1956, had fifty 24" platters and a total storage capacity of 3.75 megabytes. (lady used for scale )

Soon, companies like Western Digital and Seagate will be able to fit upwards of 10 terabytes (10,000,000 megabytes) into 3.5" desktop hard drives.

I find the advances in flash storage technology even more incredible, with SD cards now available in 512 gigabyte capacity, and MicroSD cards up to 128 gigabytes. Considering that a MicroSD is roughly the size of a human fingernail, I wonder what the approximate difference in data density is compared to those old IBM cabinet HDDs.

Edited February 5, 2015 by segaprophet

[Newt]

The 350's cabinet was 60 inches (152 cm) long, 68 inches (172 cm) high and 29 inches (74 cm) wide.

Micro [sD card]: 15.0×11.0×1.0 mm

Volume of cabinet=1.934656m^2

Volume of micro SD=.0000165m^2

Cabinet=117251.8788 sd cards(volume wise)=15008240.48Gigabytes

Cabinet= .00375 Gigabytes

1 Card=34133.3333333... Cabinets (memory-wise)

Of course sticking eleven thousand micro sd's in a usable arrangement would limit accessibility.

Edited February 5, 2015 by Newt

[Camacha]

Of course sticking eleven thousand micro sd's in a usable arrangement would limit accessibility.

Then again, just using the chips and not the housing would leave some room for other hardware.

[Newt]

Yeah. It is not exactly an easy thing to compare directly.

More to the point, I can carry a terabyte in my pocket and not notice. That is 266666.66667 of those cabinets (which I could not carry in my pocket).

[EdFred]

I remember back in the early nineties I bought a 40MB hard drive, and all my friends said, "Why are you buying such a huge drive? you will *never* fill that thing up!" We still joke about it today, pretty much anytime someone makes any reference to buying new storage. "Why are you buying a 3TB NAS, you will never fill that thing up!"

I think they were right though, I never did fill it up. I think I upgraded to something new before it filled up.

[Nuke]

that was the start of moors law. thanks to the apollo program much of the technology needed for modern electronics was invented. multilayerd pcbs, surface mount construction, integrated circuits (agc was all 3 input nand gates), etc. the only thing that hadn't been done yet is cramming more and more stuff onto a chip, which has been a slow and steady process since then thanks to moors law. chip density simply got to the point where you could put an entire cpu on one die, and this grew to more things like memory controllers gpus and cache. much of a modern cpu die is cache. its sort of like we simply ran out of things to put on there so just started piling on sram. i cant imagine it being very long till we put the dram on there too (we already have system on a chip devices).

that said i dont think we could go back to 1969 and give them a computer to reverse engineer and have them produce computers similar to what we use now. they simply would not have the tools nor the experience neccisary for the job (it was all fairly new tech). it would more or less point them in the right direction, but they would still need to rely on moors law to produce the desired results. part of that is making products to sell to pay for the next generation of r&d.

[Camacha]

that said i dont think we could go back to 1969 and give them a computer to reverse engineer and have them produce computers similar to what we use now. they simply would not have the tools nor the experience neccisary for the job (it was all fairly new tech). it would more or less point them in the right direction, but they would still need to rely on moors law to produce the desired results. part of that is making products to sell to pay for the next generation of r&d.

Right now every new generation of chips on a smaller process is hard to do, even with all the current knowledge. No way that the people back then could/can figure out how to do it by just giving them a chip. Not because they are not competent, do not get me wrong, but the gap is just too big. Giving them huge piles of information and chip making machines might do the trick, though, but that would basically mean you transport the present back to the past.

Edited February 5, 2015 by Camacha

[Jouni]

Smartphones are grossly more powerful than the Apollo computer. They have processing capacities comparable to late 90s quality PCs. Apollo guidance computer is weaker than a simple scientific calculator, and I'm not talking about the ones with graphical interface and data plotting. Luckily for the astronauts, that's pretty much all you need for a decently safe trip.

Smartphones are even more powerful than that. I'd say that a high-end smartphone today is comparable to a good desktop computer from 10 years ago, or an average supercomputer from 20-25 years ago.

[cicatrix]

Yes, we (well, not we, but computing industry) made amazing progress. The only thing that saddens me in all this is that a basic 25 Mhz 80386 processor had computing capability to control all aspects of guiding a rocket to orbit, manage a telephone database of a small city and do many other useful things. Now I have an i7 processor which outstrips this old one by several orders of magnitude. I don't even know (or care) about how many GHz my processor currently has. Blast it, my smartphone is probably thousand times more powerful than my first computer in 1987. Scientists used such processing capabilities back in 1980s on supercomputers to simulate nuclear reactions or whatever 'sciency enough'. But what we do with it now? Our smartphones spend all this computing power to connect us to people we frequently do not even know just to tap a fancy looking 'Like' button or send a senseless 'what's up' message to our buddies. My desktop PC probably spends more computing power to render a 3d 'OK' button than the whole operating system required back in 80s. Our smartphones have resolution that outstrips the capability of human eyes to distinguish a single pixel on it. Yet, the marketologists offer us 'even more resolution', 'even more gigaherz', 'even more terabytes'. Why? I have a 4 Tb drive. What am I supposed to store on it? It's 80% empty!

Consider this, if we progressed with energy production the same way we had progressed with computing power, it would look like each one of us had a small pocket battery powerful enough to maintain a fusion reaction for several days. And we would have used all this energy simply to prepare our food or light our houses.

P.S. I know that there ARE still people (scientists, researches, etc) who do need 'more gigaherz' and 'more 'terabytes'. I know that there ARE people who do serious work, but I'm talking about the majority. The ones who use their smartphones or PC to 'like' the photographs of cats on FB or post stupid tweets every 14 seconds.

Edited February 5, 2015 by cicatrix

[Beowolf]

First computer, age 16 (birthday present):

Second computer, age 18 (six month bank loan):

Third computer, six months later (eighteen-month bank loan):

Fourth computer, where people started paying me to play with their computers for them:

Why do I miss that last one the most? You never forget your first "big iron".

Edited February 5, 2015 by Beowolf

[jmiki8]

Our first "real" personal computer was a Commodore 64 in 1986. It costed a fortune to buy one here. Before 1986 when Cocom control lists were still very strict, Western companies couldn't export hi-tech goods beyond the Iron Curtain. Some eastern bloc countries (like the USSR and East Germany) could design some PCs on their own, but they were nowhere as good as their Western counterparts. Most of the Eastern computers were the reverse engineered replicas of popular Western ones. Even Hungary produced some, most of them were based on the Z80 proccessor. Our very first computer was a Videoton TVC, but it was barely a personal computer. It costed 16000 forints (the monthly medium wage was ~3000 forints that time). In 1996 we were one of the first families (not companies) having dial-up Internet (in Hungary, ofc).

Edited February 6, 2015 by jmiki8

[pxi]

I started with a ZX Spectrum +2 with all of 128K of RAM, and loading everything from tape.

When I see people complain about waiting 5 minutes for KSP to load I smile - back then that sort of thing was the norm.

[michaelsteele3]

The iPhone would of costes 2 million something in the 1990's