View Full Version : 1 gigabyte of memory then and now
SteamWake
08-06-09, 02:33 PM
A photo illustration of 1 gig of memory circa 1980 and current times.
Hard to believe.
http://i259.photobucket.com/albums/hh312/UlteriorModem/1gbthennow.jpg
Task Force
08-06-09, 02:36 PM
Holy crap. its as big/bigger as/than a dinner plate...
the memorycard that is representing now is rather big, ive got an 8 gigabyte memorycard that is slightly less than half of it
SteamWake
08-06-09, 03:19 PM
Holy crap. its as big/bigger as/than a dinner plate...
LOL at first glance I thought it was a flywheel out of a volkswagon :rotfl:
But how much cooler is that old memory? I want four of those bad boys hanging from the side of my case, hissing and steaming with a faint radioactive glow. Oh, and the voice from Command & Conquer telling me how much RAM I am using.
Onkel Neal
08-06-09, 06:59 PM
the memorycard that is representing now is rather big, ive got an 8 gigabyte memorycard that is slightly less than half of it
:haha: Won't be long before memory will be a virtual entity.
:haha: Won't be long before memory will be a virtual entity.
Isn't it already?
You can pick up storage devices, but you can't pick up the memory/information stored inside.
Onkel Neal
08-06-09, 08:20 PM
Hmmm... that's right.
Zachstar
08-06-09, 09:22 PM
That card is actually very big. On a modern hard drive platter you can fit 500GB making each GB "Spot" difficult to spot.
And on top of that you've got SSD tech that can fit a gig into an area almost too small to see.
bookworm_020
08-06-09, 10:23 PM
Reminds you how much things have changed:hmmm:
antikristuseke
08-06-09, 10:56 PM
Are my eyes decieving me or are those the largest platers I have ever seen?
Ahhh, the good old days of an real Hard (and heavy) heavy drive!:D
Melonfish
08-07-09, 06:23 AM
my m8's got a hard drive from gods knows when, its a 70mb drive, its the size of a breezeblock and weighs as much as the same size of depleted uranium!!!
Kazuaki Shimazaki II
08-07-09, 06:56 AM
Actually, the 1980 1GB looks smaller than I would have imagined. Even when I had my first computer around the early 90s, 1GB was a pretty unreachable amount IIRC - mine had around 420MB and was it 16MB RAM or was it only 8?
Melonfish
08-07-09, 09:02 AM
i remember the external hard drives for my amiga back in the early 90's it was the same size as the entire pc but only 10% its width.
it was HUGE holding a whopping 150mb!
in fact here's one right here ;)
http://amiga.erkan.se/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/amiga-harddrive.jpg
Spoon 11th
08-08-09, 12:13 AM
5MB from 1956.
http://www.popular-pics.com/pictures.aspx?photoid=422
Task Force
08-08-09, 12:37 AM
5MB from 1956.
http://www.popular-pics.com/pictures.aspx?photoid=422
Holy crap thats big...
Wolfehunter
08-08-09, 12:58 AM
I've seen some big hardrives.. big floppy drives... I've never seen ram that big before... :o Jezzz.
This was my first computer fully equipped with voice and sound
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-99/4A
back in the early 80s.. I still have it boxed...
Bill Nichols
08-08-09, 05:38 AM
i remember the external hard drives for my amiga back in the early 90's it was the same size as the entire pc but only 10% its width.
it was HUGE holding a whopping 150mb!
in fact here's one right here ;)
http://amiga.erkan.se/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/amiga-harddrive.jpg
I can beat that. For my Apple ][ in the mid-1980s, my 10 MByte external drive was the size of a shoebox.
:arrgh!:
It won't be long before we talk of Yobibyte hard drives that we can hold in
the palm of our hand. The future will think of us as we think of the past.
SteamWake
08-08-09, 07:08 AM
It won't be long before we talk of Yobibyte hard drives that we can hold in
the palm of our hand. The future will think [of] us as we think of the past.
and they would be right :rotfl:
Sailor Steve
08-08-09, 11:25 AM
And even before that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
Platapus
08-08-09, 11:49 AM
I remember when DEC came out with one of the first commercial hard drives. It was the size of a desktop computer and held 5 Megabytes. This was back in the early 80's.
At that time, I thought that there was no way a normal person would ever buy this. 5MB? No ordinary user would ever have that much data. Perhaps a big corporation could use 5MB but not an individual consumer.
Oh my how things have changed. Now we have terabyte drives for just a few hundred dollars.
OneToughHerring
08-08-09, 11:53 AM
I remember when DEC came out with one of the first commercial hard drives. It was the size of a desktop computer and held 5 Megabytes. This was back in the early 80's.
At that time, I thought that there was no way a normal person would ever buy this. 5MB? No ordinary user would ever have that much data. Perhaps a big corporation could use 5MB but not an individual consumer.
Oh my how things have changed. Now we have terabyte drives for just a few hundred dollars.
Well it hasn't really changed that much given that it's been 20-30 years since the true commercial take-off of desktop & home computers. When I thought about the 2000 and beyond in, say, 1985, it was a pretty distant and almost sci-fi thing to fathom. Now we know that it's more about the commercial side of the whole thing that matters, home computers don't evolve any quicker then it's commercially wise for the makers meaning that they evolve about as slow as they can. And one still has to dish out pretty much the same amount of money for a decent/ok cpu.
kiwi_2005
08-08-09, 02:53 PM
I have 5 old 1 & 2gig hdd's store away & they are quite heavy in weight big square devices like giant data cards. And last time i hooked them up they still ran well although a bit noisy. I figure if i hold on to em for another 10yrs or so they be worth a bit to some collector ;)
GoldenRivet
08-08-09, 09:23 PM
5MB from 1956.
http://www.popular-pics.com/pictures.aspx?photoid=422
you could get maybe TWO MP3 songs on that thing :har:
Sailor Steve
08-10-09, 12:54 PM
At that time, I thought that there was no way a normal person would ever buy this. 5MB? No ordinary user would ever have that much data. Perhaps a big corporation could use 5MB but not an individual consumer.
Oh my how things have changed. Now we have terabyte drives for just a few hundred dollars.
I had an Atari 520ST back in the '80s. It had no hard drive. I bought a 20MB add-on, and thought about upgrading, but a friend warned me away from the 50MB rig because "It always crashes".
In 1998 I bought my first PC and made the same comments: 10GB was impossibly huge, and there's no way I would ever fill it up.
Today I use more than that for my SH3 installations!:dead:
FIREWALL
08-10-09, 01:13 PM
Looks like a Dual caliper disc brake to me. :haha:
Back in 1985 when i worked for IBM the first harddisk arrived at the office,50MB.....state of the art technology then and we were the first in Europe to receive one....everybody wanted a look so we had extra coffee and chairs so people could wait for their turn to watch 'the magic' as we called it...the price was something like a new house i remember that..
We had a great offer from the company,the 'mother of all pc's' the 8086 processor.A 14 inch monochrome monitor,a keyboard and 2 floppydirves ,2! for the small amout of only 17.000 which was really cheap back then!I declined the offer because i had a Commodore 64(couldnt tell the company about that in those days)..10 years later i did buy one just for nostalgia,i paid $300...an a colour monitor included..
But that 1GB looks really cool,wouldnt mind installing one just for the looks..
we came a long way,micro SD 16GB.....in a mobile phone:up:
vBulletin® v3.8.11, Copyright ©2000-2025, vBulletin Solutions Inc.