Can u believe this?

I'd quite like to get hold of a very old DOS, (can't remember at this distance what the number would have been in the mid 80's 2.x or 3.x I'd guess), cause I've till got the BASIC code I wrote for the game Othello, which at the time was quite sophisticated, but would probably look amazingly crude now. I'd still like to see it run again out of pure nostalgia.
On the nostalgia kick Peter, one old codger to another; we talked in Jan, in Ron!n's browser poll thread about old (first) computers.
I've just looked up, via the IBM archive, some statistics on the 360/50 which was my first system and found that the 4 banks of 8 disk drives each containing a 14" diameter disk stack of 11 plates (20 recording surfaces, 10 floating double-sided disk heads) had a total storage capacity of under 1Gb ! That's less than the flash drive I use for running Opera as a mobile browser, which I bought for about £6-7. The processor had a 500 nanosecond cycle time which I equate to a 2Kz CPU (though processors weren't described in that way at the time, but by their instructions/sec rate.
By my reckoning that makes my current PC about 1500 times bigger and 2 million times faster.
That amazes me so much, I feel I must have miscalculated somewhere.
It would seem that every job I ever ran in 2 years as an operator, could be done in about 30 seconds on this machine. (not counting the I/O of course)
 
LOL.....I have a 2gb micro-SD card in my camera, an 8gb USB stick for other uses...it is amazing how progress miniaturises everything.
100 years from now we'll probably see OS's with minimum requirements 100TB....yikes. But by then that will probably exist as a micro-chip.

I see from that ad on Amazon
  • Must have DOS 2.11 or later. 8088 or higher processor. 512K memory. 3.5" disk drive. Optional mouse
 
i remember my dad had a 128mb flash drive and i was amazed that you could actually store information on such a small thing and it was not that small!!
 
Come on. 128MB flash is nothing. I have a 64MB somewhere in this mess. A regular floppy holds 1.44MB. I dont even remember what a 5 and a quater discs used to hold. The real big floppies. I think those were only about 70 or 80 KB. Wikipedia says 89.6KB. So yeah. Be happy they got storage to where it is. Was much worse back then. Of course things back then were rather small as well. Doom was only about 3 floppies big. If that.
 
yeah i remember this really nice game i used to have. It was like a Mario game but with numbers. It was around half a floppy disk. Plus i remember trying to move files to a laptop with no cd drive. I had to use a zip drive in the end i think (after i ran out of floppies, the file was like 20 mb). Now all you need is a flash drive.

But im probably still fresh at this (relatively) you guys probably have more memories of the differences between now and then.
 
That is for sure. Working on the AppleIIe which needed 2 of the 5.25 floppies to boot with. Playing games like Oregon Trail on there. Wow how times have changed. Be happy that PC are whey they are. Many people dont remember the early days of the internet when it was all text. No pics at all. That is when i first started to dial into the net using a 9600 bps modem. That is baud per second. Not even KB per second. Super slow.
 
LOL.....I have a 2gb micro-SD card in my camera, an 8gb USB stick for other uses...it is amazing how progress miniaturises everything.
100 years from now we'll probably see OS's with minimum requirements 100TB....yikes. But by then that will probably exist as a micro-chip.

I guess we're happy that we wont get to see that, Peter :grinning:

Come on. 128MB flash is nothing. I have a 64MB somewhere in this mess. A regular floppy holds 1.44MB. I dont even remember what a 5 and a quater discs used to hold. The real big floppies. I think those were only about 70 or 80 KB. Wikipedia says 89.6KB. So yeah. Be happy they got storage to where it is. Was much worse back then. Of course things back then were rather small as well. Doom was only about 3 floppies big. If that.

My USB Flash disk:
spd_20060915111505_b.jpg

Just that, mine is 256MB :smile: it has 4 in 1 card reader. I have my .max backup files and textures on it, it does it work so I'm happy with it, I still wouldn't go for a bigger space USB disc :smile:
 
is that a card reader and a flash or only a card reader
p.s.: isn't that a phone memory card? but there is still smaller the micro which is like... well micro
 
i realized something that flash drives have gotten so small the only thing holding them back from becoming invisible is the size of the USB head are there actually phones that can have flash drives connected to them?
 
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