Comments on: Arlo and Janis, 1998

By: Todd

Todd — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:38:36 +0000

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?

By: nonegiven

nonegiven — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:49:04 +0000

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

By: John Small Berries

John Small Berries — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 15:00:01 +0000

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.

By: Christian

Christian — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:08:05 +0000

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

By: Powers

Powers — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 13:01:59 +0000

@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?

By: Ian Osmond

Ian Osmond — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 11:53:18 +0000

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

By: jjmcgaffey

jjmcgaffey — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 10:12:41 +0000

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?

By: Morris Keesan

Morris Keesan — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:52:33 +0000

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

By: Frank the curmudgeon

Frank the curmudgeon — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 04:34:26 +0000

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

By: Tim

Tim — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 03:59:33 +0000

*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!