I'm Getting Old

[bjarvis]

About 15 years ago, I spent something like $5k CDN to purchase a 32 MB VME memory board --about 18 inches on each side-- for a Sun 4/280.

Today at Staples, there was a bin at the checkout counter of 64 MB flash memory USB fobs for $7.60 each. At first glance, I mistook them for candy.

Gad.

Comments

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

I know! Memory cards are now cheap as I don't know what price wise and I've noticed that anything less than 64MB seem to be extinct now and even 1G SD cards are getting really affordable now.

Heck, even HD's are now so cheap that a crappy 300GB Seagate drive can be had at Fryes for less than $100.

I remember when it was the big thing to hear of HD's getting to 1G back in the mid 90's...

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Yeah... at about the same time I was buying the memory board, I also bought a 2 GB SCSI hard drive for the same server. At that point, our rule of thumb was that one paid $1 per MB of data so the 2 GB drive was a bit over $2k. Now it's pennies per MB and our iPods have more space than past disk arrays.

[brunorepublic.livejournal.com]

I bought my first PC in 1996, a very much vision-of-the-future product from Toshiba. It was very stylish, black instead of beige, came with all sorts of goodies like built-in speakers and lots of software, and had these funny USB jacks that there didn't seem to be any use for. All this seemed to far ahead of its time, and Toshiba left the desktop market shortly after that to focus on laptops.

Prior to that, I'd been using an Atari ST with 1MB of RAM, and no hard drive. I recently bought 1 GB of RAM for less than what it cost me for an additional 16MB of RAM on that PC. There are now memory cards with more space than the 1.5GB drive that it had.

Recently, I put together a system for a friend of mine. It has at least 20x the processing power of that Toshiba (going just by clock speed, it's probably much higher all things considered), 100x the hard drive space, and 32x the RAM. And it's a budget system that cost 1/4 of what that Toshiba did back in the day.

I remember working at a place which spent several thousand dollars on a massive file-server. We were totally blown away by this thing: dual Pentium-100 chips, 9 hard drives for a whopping 9 GB of storage space, and something like 128MB of RAM! Wow, what an awe-inspiring powerful machine!! Was there anything it couldn't do?

Still, I'd have to say the ultimate future shock was discovering arcade games when I was a kid. I remember spending so many hours in darkened rooms filled with massive, refrigerator-sized machines, all glowing, flashing, bleeping and buzzing. I remember being mesmerized by these hi-tech monoliths, and thinking to myself "wow... the future has arrived".

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

Prior to that, I'd been using an Atari ST with 1MB of RAM, and no hard drive.

The 1040ST? I was looking at the Atari 520ST and 1040ST at the time I decided to upgrade from my Commodore 64 (purchased in 1984... still works!) but went with the Amiga 500 instead.

[brunorepublic.livejournal.com]

I was using it for MIDI sequencing, for which it was excellent. Ironically, I bought a PC because I was worried about the durability of a machine that relied on an old floppy drive. Three years later, that PC suffered a sudden and total hard drive failure, taking all my work with it.

I still have the Atari floppies though.

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of a less techie but poignant experience of my own reminding me of the passage of time. I'm in line at the supermarket, and the guy in front of me (who I took to be optimistically five or so years younger than me) gets carded. I am buying booze as well, but rather than getting carded, I get asked whether I need any assistance to the parking lot.

The sad thing is, this happened almost 10 years ago. I've been asked a lot of times in between about that assistance. I tell myself it's because they're required to ask.

That is, right after I put my teeth back in and wipe the drool off my chin.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

I am buying booze as well, but rather than getting carded, I get asked whether I need any assistance to the parking lot.

Ow. Next time, whack 'em with your walker. :-)

[trawnapanda.livejournal.com]

in 1987 I started using an XT at work to keep track of student grades, and to word process the lab manuals ( in WordPerfect 4.2), and after two or three weeks I knew I wanted one for my very own. (even though you did have to shut down one application - say, Lotus 1-2-3 - to fire up another, say the wordpro application)

It was 1988 when I got the cash together, since it was $5000 for the setup -- an XT, with a 5.25 floppy drive and a blistering 32meg hard drive. The monitor was glorious amber and grey (better to look at than green, apparently). with inflation (taking the price of a stamp as a decent indicator), that would be about $6800 in today's dollars.

last July I bought a laptop for 20% of that, and it would have been significantly less, had I not put 2Gig of RAM in it.

the USB memory keys are going to be coming enclosed in cornflakes boxes soon.