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

[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".