Arlo and Janis, 1998

Cidu Bill on Jan 12th 2010

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Filed in 1998, Arlo and Janis, Jimmy Johnson, comic strips, comics, computers, humor | 28 responses so far

28 Responses to “Arlo and Janis, 1998”

  1. Lord-z Jan 12th 2010 at 12:07 pm 1

    Thats what I said about terrabites just two years ago. Say Hi to my nearly filled Terrabite harddisk.

  2. Elyrest Jan 12th 2010 at 12:10 pm 2

    If it is there we will fill it.

  3. John Small Berries Jan 12th 2010 at 12:23 pm 3

    4GB? Jeez, the smallest hard drive for sale at Newegg is 36.7GB. Where does he shop for computers, “Suckers-R-You”?

    Though I did find the strip amusing. The first hard drive I bought, I was assured that it would be more storage space than I would ever need in my life. It was a whopping 40 megabytes.

  4. Nicole Jan 12th 2010 at 12:41 pm 4

    4gb ??? I remember when 20MB was jawdropping

  5. Scott Jan 12th 2010 at 12:42 pm 5

    And going backwards in time, in 1975 or so when I was in grad school one of my fellow students added some hardware to our PDP-11 to get it up to 28 kbytes. Now it will never run out of memory, he said proudly, just seconds before my Star Trek game ran out of memory.

  6. Dyfsunctional Jan 12th 2010 at 12:44 pm 6

    I’m no computer expert, but somewhere along the line, I grasped the difference between gigabyte as in “memory” and gigabyte as in “hard drive.” As of 1998, Arlo apparently hadn’t.

  7. dwc Jan 12th 2010 at 12:55 pm 7

    My first computer, which I bought in 1998, had a 4 GB hard drive!

  8. Charlene Jan 12th 2010 at 01:08 pm 8

    “Star Trek game”

    Was that the one where you shot Klingons (represented by “K”s, if I recall correctly) and duck asterisk-stars?

  9. Ted in Fort Lauderdale Jan 12th 2010 at 01:26 pm 9

    JSB: I’m not sure what the “standard” mass market disk size was in 1998, but it could well have been 4GB. Things have advanced at lot in the last 10-12 years…

    Nichole: on a PC class machine? I’m guessing that would have been mid-80’s? The first disk drives I worked with directly (as in actually touched) were 2310/2315 removable cartridge drives on minicomputers in the mid-late 70’s - 14″ disks in big plastic cartridges, holding a whopping 2.5MB each…
    By the very early 80’s, our systems supported up to 3330 class drives - big cartridges (each the size of a big cake) plugging into a drive the size of a large dishwasher or small washing machine and holding 100MB (which impressed the hell out of us at the time).

    Scott: you are talking about RAM (probably core), not disks. Disks were never that small, but 28kB was a decent amount of RAM for a PDP-11 back then, especially the smaller models…

    Dysfunctional: yes, but disk drives are memory, too. Generally (even back in 1998, I think), “memory” refers to RAM, but I have heard people use the term in contexts where it was clear they were referring to disk space.

    This has been my geezer moment for today (so far, anyway) - thank you all for participating…

  10. Ted in Fort Lauderdale Jan 12th 2010 at 01:32 pm 10

    Charlene - I’m pretty sure that would be the one. Ran impressively slowly on an ASR-33 teletype…

    That was already running on our systems when I got there, but I remember porting ADVENT (Crowther’s Adventure game) to our system - all useful development work came to a halt for about 2 weeks after that…

  11. Christian Jan 12th 2010 at 01:49 pm 11

    In 1999 some people at Berkeley guesstimated that humans generated a grand total of about 2 exabytes of digital data that year: http://www.economist.com/search/displaystory.cfm?story_id=E1_NNQGNRD&source=login_payBarrier
    In 2002 they repeated their guesstimation and determined that humans generated about 5 exabytes of digital data that year. If that rate of growth continues humans will be generating 1 googol of data every year by about 2600 AD. But if one Googles googol one quickly discovers that “There isn’t a googol of anything in the universe. Not stars, not dust particles, not atoms.” In fact, even if humans find a way to cram 1 byte of data onto a single atom, and if we strip-mine the earth’s crust 1 km deep around the globe, we’ll run out of material with which to make hard drives by about 2160.

  12. Scott E Jan 12th 2010 at 02:38 pm 12

    I have twice that much on my iPod nano.

  13. Larry Jan 12th 2010 at 06:10 pm 13

    My first computer in 1981 came with 4K of RAM & no hard drive. Data was saved to cassette tapes!

  14. Steven Hunter Jan 12th 2010 at 08:15 pm 14

    @Larry - That’s nothing! My first computer was so old… (HOW OLD WAS IT?!) It was so old that we didn’t have 1s, only 0s.

  15. The Bad Seed Jan 12th 2010 at 08:18 pm 15

    Wow, this strip does take me back, too! I think my first laptop, a 286 I mail-ordered circa 1992, had 4 MB RAM and a 20 MB disk which I compressed to 40 MB after I upgraded to DOS 5 (a much-anticipated and -heralded upgrade which was very exciting at the time). Since Windows just limped along on it, I upgraded to a desktop circa 1995, and was awestruck that they now had hard drives over 1 MB - I got 1.2! Of course, being a true dinosaur, I guess I should admit to being in the “academically talented” program at my high school when we were the only ones trusted with the district’s first computers: 5 or 6 TRS-80’s! Very exciting!

  16. Ray Brady Jan 12th 2010 at 08:35 pm 16

    My credit card has more memory than my first computer did.

  17. furrykef Jan 12th 2010 at 09:37 pm 17

    Christian — it may depend on how you define “generate”. I think a “generated” byte needn’t be permanently stored, or even stored for a day. It’s fully possible for a website to use a terabyte of bandwidth every month, yet none of it being permanently stored anywhere.

    So I guess to make a reasonable estimation, one would first need to define a “generated byte”.

    - Kef

  18. Christian Jan 12th 2010 at 10:45 pm 18

    Well, furrykef, look at the article in the Economist. The 2 and 5 exabyte estimations do seem to refer to digital data that’s actually created and stored somewhere. The article makes a distinction between the estimates for that kind of data creation vs. data flow (i.e. transmitted data like phone calls, radio, TV, etc.). They estimated for 2002 the volume of digital information flow to be around 18 exabytes (of which about 99% was phone calls). On the one hand, it is important to consider how long that 2 - 5 XB of data remained stored on digital storage devices. On the other hand, that’s still an enormous amount of data to be generating every year, and is surely ridiculously more now (if the growth from 1999-2002 continued at about 30%/year we should be generating about 60 XB this year, and honestly that seems a bit low to me. After all, it’s only 60 million terabytes. That seems easily within annual PC/laptop/phone sales figures).

  19. Tim Jan 12th 2010 at 10:59 pm 19

    *in geezer voice*
    I remember not even having a hard drive… I saved my programs on audio cassette tape. I remember buying special 5 minute tapes, just for computers. And I remember buying magazines and typing in programs by hand. Some of them filled up two whole pages!

  20. Frank the curmudgeon Jan 12th 2010 at 11:34 pm 20

    Trippin’ down memory lane and stubbing your toe on the IBM 370. 126 and punch cards. Watfor ? Watfive!

  21. Morris Keesan Jan 12th 2010 at 11:52 pm 21

    Tim, you can’t be a real geezer if you had audio cassette tapes. I saved my earliest programs on punched paper tape.

  22. jjmcgaffey Jan 13th 2010 at 05:12 am 22

    My first was an Atari 400 - after I wore out the keyboard, I moved up to an Atari 800. About a year after that, I got a wonderful attachment - a cassette tape recorder so I could actually _store_ some of those many programs I typed in from Atari magazine…rather than typing them in, in full, every time I wanted to run one. Fun. I took that Atari to college in 1986, too, and was the only person in my classes who had typed papers (printed on a 9-pin printer!). At least one teacher required me to copy them out in longhand so I wouldn’t have an unfair advantage. And in college I also experienced programming via punched cards - though only as a demonstration of ‘how we used to do it’. I don’t remember what we actually used - probably 5 1/4″ disks. We got the Atari 400 as a gift-with-purchase when my dad got his CP/M machine with the 8″ disks - a great improvement over his dumb terminal. And the sound of that machine accessing a disk (grind-grind-rmmmm-clunk) is still the sound of adventure to me - it meant I’d gotten into a new area of Colossal Caves (the original Adventure)!

    Ain’t geek geezer games fun?

  23. Ian Osmond Jan 13th 2010 at 06:53 am 23

    My computer has more on-chip L1 fast cache memory than my first hard drive.

  24. Powers Jan 13th 2010 at 08:01 am 24

    @Christian: A googol is not a unit of measurement. You can’t have “a googol of data”. It’s just a number; it’s like saying “5 thousand of data”. 5 thousand *what*? Bytes? Bits?

  25. Christian Jan 13th 2010 at 10:08 pm 25

    Powers: OK, then, I meant to say “a googol-byte of data”

  26. John Small Berries Jan 14th 2010 at 10:00 am 26

    Ted In Fort Lauderdale: My bad - I interpreted the post’s title (Arlo and Janis, 1998) as saying “Jimmy Johnson is so far behind the times that this strip produced in 2010 assumes that 4GB is a large hard drive”. I didn’t see the copyright date in the strip.

  27. nonegiven Jan 14th 2010 at 04:49 pm 27

    My first computer had a 20 MB hard drive. My son’s first computer he had to store his stuff on a cassette tape.

  28. Todd Jan 21st 2010 at 03:38 pm 28

    Others have me beat, but my dad’s first computer, in the early 80s, was a Sanyo MBC-1150 (I think) running CPM with two 5¼ floppy disks. Not sure what the ram was, but it had no hard drive.

    In ‘92, my mom got a Packard Bell ‘286 8/16mhz with 2mb of ram and an 85mb hard drive.

    The smartphone I just got has a 1ghz processor, 512mb flash, 512mb ram, and a 4gb micro-sd card. And I’m worried I’m going to fill the sd card up too quickly, so I’m thinking of getting a 16gb card.

    What I wonder is, how do they know that the phone can support a 32gb card, when such cards aren’t available yet?

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