1998 Flashback
Cidu Bill on Jul 30th 2010
I’d have called you crazy if you told me that 12 years later, I’d be carrying around a cell phone with more than 8 gigabytes of memory.
Filed in Arlo and Janis, Jimmy Johnson, comic strips, comics, computers, humor | 43 responses so far
Mark in Boston Jul 30th 2010 at 03:47 pm 1
At my first job as a computer operator at a “service bureau” (i.e. companies that didn’t have computers did their work on our computer) the president of the company would bring prospects through the computer room and point out the rank of IBM 3330 disk drives, looking like a row of pizza ovens. “Each disk drive holds 30 million bytes. We can have a quarter of a billion bytes online at once!”
Detcord Jul 30th 2010 at 04:07 pm 2
A long time ago, my friend and I ordered our first desktops (build-your-own) at the same time. His arrived first, with 10 (yes TEN) megabytes of disk space. He was chuffed. For some reason, mine didn’t arrive for another month (a whole thirty days
). It was worth the wait, however, as I got one of the first 20 (Yee-Ha TWENTY) megabytes of hard disk space. WOW!
… I still have it.
furrykef Jul 30th 2010 at 04:16 pm 3
Indeed, one wonders just how far it will go. Will we eventually have cell phones with terabytes of storage? What would we do with that?
CPUs seem to have advanced surprisingly little in comparison over the last 10 years, though. The first gigahertz processors became widespread about ten years ago, and we’ve yet to hit 5 GHz. (By comparison, the 486 came out in 1989 and that ran at a maximum of 100 MHz, and most of them were much slower than that at first.)
Of course, clock speed doesn’t tell the whole story, since a 2 GHz processor can easily be as fast as a 5 GHz processor would be, depending on various factors, but these “various factors” are a lot harder to quantify. And there have been significant improvements in CPU design that makes the chips, on the whole, run faster, but we’ve long hit the point where we’re resorting to dual-core and multi-core designs to try to get more speed. Unfortunately, that’s a proposition of diminishing returns: twice as many cores doesn’t get you twice as much speed, and each core helps less than the last one did. In many cases, multiple cores won’t make an individual program run faster at all. Unless some new technology arises, we might well take CPUs to their very limits soon.
James Schend Jul 30th 2010 at 04:43 pm 4
Furrykef: a 1.5 GHz Core CPU (even a single core one) is much faster than a 3.0 GHz Pentium IV. It also produces less heat, and consumes less power.
Apple was trying to dispell the “megahertz myth” for years and years, back when their PPC chips running at 1 MHz could beat Intel chips running at 2 MHz, it’s funny to see that this now Intel’s in the same boat.
(AMD also went a time when they’d name their CPUs after the Pentium IV speed they were roughly equivalent to– thus your AMD Athlon 1700 actually ran at 1.4 GHz, not 1.7 as the name implies.)
lord-z Jul 30th 2010 at 04:48 pm 5
I saw an episode of X-Files from the early nineties, where a very impressed guy explains that something has a memory equal to 7 10gb Hard Drives.
crf Jul 30th 2010 at 05:23 pm 6
4 GB hard drives were what was offered in 1998.
He’s mistaking hard drives for computer RAM.
furrykef Jul 30th 2010 at 05:42 pm 7
James Schend - yeah, I addressed that. “Of course, clock speed doesn’t tell the whole story…”, etc. My point isn’t really that CPUs aren’t improving much, but that we’re having to get a lot more inventive with how we improve them and I’m half worried that we’ll hit the bottom of that well of creativity.
Andréa Jul 30th 2010 at 05:58 pm 8
I still remember the day our school district’s Director of Library Services wheeled an Apple IIc into my high school library office and said, “This is the future of libraries.” I laughed . . . little did I know . . . .
Mark Dalrymple Jul 30th 2010 at 06:00 pm 9
CPUs are actually still improving. Moore’s law, when interpreted as “the number of transistors doubles every 18 months”, is still in effect. Unfortunately due to the laws of physics, speed of light, etc, it’s not really possible to continue cranking up the clock speed like we enjoyed in the 90s. Now all of those transistors are going into multiple cores, with the cores getting tinier and tinier every generation.
For massive improvements in performance, we can’t rely on the hardware guys soley any more. The software folks (including me) have to change the techniques and algorithms used and create parallel and concurrent code. That’s going to take longer and be much more painful.
Today’s GPUS are also fascinating to watch. Since they address a much narrower slice of computation, they are *insanely* powerful and *massively* parallel. Instead of 4 or 8 cores, there are hundreds, all working in parallel, with programming models that encourage parallelism.
As a software dweeb, this is a tremendously exciting time to be in.
Ted in Fort Lauderdale Jul 30th 2010 at 06:35 pm 10
Going into full dinosaur/nerd mode here:
Mark in Boston - a 3330 (model 1) held 100MB. The 30MB IBM DASD would have been a 2314…
furrykef - as others pointed out, CPUs really _have_ gotten much faster, even single threaded, and especially if you have a workload that can keep multiple processors busy. Admittedly, that’s difficult (well, less so for scientific or commercial workloads), but the main (consumer) apps that really stress current CPUs (games and multimedia) generally take to multi-threading well. What _hasn’t_ kept pace is memory speed (both RAM and disk) - aside from multi-pumping, RAM has only gotten 2 or so times faster in the last 10 years, and disks (aside from transfer rate) not even that. _Size_ increases, yes…
James Schend - I think you meant PPC @ 1 _Ghz_ vs Intel at 2 _GHz_
crf - don’t get your comment. Arlo is talking about (1998 era) disk drives; Bill is talking about (2010 era) flash (disk equivalent) in his phone…
When I think that an average smart phone is (by numerous measures) _way_ more powerful than the big iron that was the only real computing resource at my university (supporting the admin, hospital, and 20000 students) - well, it makes me feel old :)…
George Jul 30th 2010 at 07:04 pm 11
CPUs continue to improve. However, it’s a lot harder to tell how now.
The big reason? Marketing. The silly names they come up with now don’t mean things like they used to.
It’s gotten so bad that Intel now rates performance of different CPUs by a numbers of stars. http://www.desktopreview.com/default.asp?newsID=666
Steffen Jul 30th 2010 at 07:18 pm 12
Aaaaagh, hard drive space is not memory!
George Jul 30th 2010 at 07:31 pm 13
Sure it is. It’s just a different form of memory.
Back in the day, when real memory was ungodly expensive, most of your memory space was virtual and existed on a hard drive.
furrykef Jul 30th 2010 at 07:38 pm 14
Steffen — nobody here is confusing hard drive space and memory (though, as George points out, the former is still a form of memory). Bill did say “8 gigabytes of memory” in the description under the comic, but I think it would be a gross blunder to refer to a phone’s storage as “hard drive space”.
(But still, perhaps “storage” rather than “memory”.)
Pete Jul 30th 2010 at 07:57 pm 15
I remember the novelization of The Wrath Of Khaaaaan. It expanded the movie plot by giving a back story to the members of the Genesis team. There were a couple of members of the team who also wrote computer games in their spare time. There was a point where their latest creation had to be wiped, because it occupied the entire computer storage available. The size of the file was, wait for it … fifty megs.
Mark in Boston Jul 30th 2010 at 09:06 pm 16
OK, everyone. Now think back to when you wanted to buy your first computer. What did the salesman at Radio Shack or The Byte Store tell you it was useful for?
“You can use it in the kitchen to keep track of your recipes. It can tell you when you need to buy more milk, for instance.”
Now, does anyone use a computer to do that?
Cidu Bill Jul 30th 2010 at 09:40 pm 17
I started out using punchcards, so it all seems like magic to me.
Pete Jul 30th 2010 at 10:34 pm 18
When I bought my ZX81 I was told that it could help me run my power station.
(Okay, I, personally, wasn’t told that, but Clive Sinclair did say it. He also said that the 16k expansion pack was more memory than anyone could ever use.)
Kilby Jul 31st 2010 at 12:30 am 19
In high school we had access to a Telex terminal (and could “save” printouts on paper tape), as well as two IBM card punch machines. The company that processed our Fortran assignments (usually twice a week) later upgraded from an IBM 360 (with 2 MB of “core” memory) to a 370 that had a whopping 6 MB (wow!). The net effect was that the bottleneck was moved from “waiting to get into the machine to run” all the way to “waiting for the system operator to get the job printed out and returned to the pickup desk“.
Dyfsunctional Jul 31st 2010 at 01:40 am 20
Isn’t this a repeat?
Detcord Jul 31st 2010 at 02:17 am 21
Yeah, I remember punchcards. Some at my university used to play a version of 52 card pick-up. If a neophyte Freshman was seen carrying a deck of unbound punchcards, well a slight bump at the shoulder, the sort one gets routinely in the halls, would send them flying. That’s how I learned to use rubber bands and label or number my cards.
Who says you don’t learn useful things at Uni?
Heather D Jul 31st 2010 at 06:38 am 22
A couple years ago, I bought an MP3 player with 2GB of memory (or STORAGE for the memory-nazis) for around $50-60. It wasn’t a top-of-the-line model, I deliberately bought something cheaper rather than more extravagant. You could get much more memory, sure, but the cheapest that an MP3 was going for at all seemed to be $40-50.
Yesterday I saw a 2GB MP3 player in a store for $15.
dwc Jul 31st 2010 at 06:40 am 23
I got my first computer in 1998 for $2,000 and it had a 4 GB hard drive in it.
Today you can get 4 GB flash drives for $10.
Could a 4 TB hard drive be just around the corner? (And maybe in 12 years that’ll be too small; and by that time, 4 PB (petabyte; 1000 TB) hard drives would be commonplace!)
Heather D Jul 31st 2010 at 06:40 am 24
Oh, and our first PC package (400 SX25, as I recall) that we bought as a young college couple, including the printer and monitor, was $3000. We took out a loan to get the computer. And that was the “special academic pricing” too.
Lola Jul 31st 2010 at 07:22 am 25
Dang. I just finally disposed of this one. We paid $2499 for it in 1984 and that included a dot matrix printer.
http://www.qx10.com/qxmanual.html
Who knew there were 1000s still in use and people were fixing them. Should have put that sucker on eBay.
8 bits baby!
Ian Osmond Jul 31st 2010 at 07:23 am 26
The computer I have now has more on-chip L1 cache than my first computer had disk space.
And this computer is over a year old.
It’s got a terrabyte of storage. RAIDed.
I’m only mildly geezerish — I’m in my mid-thirties — and I still can’t quite get over the future shock of personally having a terrabyte of storage. But given that we’re ripping all our music to it and storing the CDs in the basement, it’s actually useful.
Keera Jul 31st 2010 at 08:30 am 27
When I first entered the work force, so-called mini-computers were the size of a fridge. My Commodore 64 was huge compared to its competitors, which had half the memory at 32K. My newest cell phone has a very tiny flash card in it that holds 8 GB of stuff. I’ve gone from 8″ to 5 1/4″ to 3.5″ floppies to no floppies at all.
It has never surprised me that computers would get smaller but it has surprised all of sci-fi-dom. I’ve often wondered what “Star Trek” would have looked like if they knew how small computers were going to get (and, conversely, how huge screens were going to get).
Dave in Asheville Jul 31st 2010 at 09:26 am 28
One thing Star Trek did get presciently correct was the solid-state memory device. I remember, back when 5 1/4″ floppy disks were the main portable storage device , Kirk dropped a credit-card sized block of plastic into “the computer” slot and the computer read it. I remember thinking that was so unrealistic, even for the future… “No moving parts? No spinning disk? How could the computer even read it then?”
Powers Jul 31st 2010 at 10:47 am 29
In defense of Star Trek, we don’t know how far WWIII set back technology in the fiction. =)
They also (well, TNG did) correctly predicted hand-held computer tablets networked into a larger system.
Dave Jul 31st 2010 at 11:09 am 30
@Keera
ahh 8″ floppies. where did we go wrong? LOL those things were great. i’m only just old enough to remember them but i recall it was like carrying a small briefcase of floppy disks !
Keera Jul 31st 2010 at 11:28 am 31
Dave @29, we still carry small briefcases or binders. These days, they are filled with 4.75″ CDs/DVDs. What will really be something is when something the size of a card case will work anywhere, any time, regardless of machine and OS. Come to think of it, credit cards are actually the most advanced technological doohickey we have.
Mark in Boston Jul 31st 2010 at 07:46 pm 32
Remember “2001: A Space Odyssey”? The two astronauts eating dinner, watching the news on their iPads?
George P Aug 1st 2010 at 10:15 am 33
Pete, did Clive also tell you you’d need a rubber band to hold that 16K memory pack in place?
I am bothered by referring to hard drive space as “memory” because it can make it difficult to provide support. I understand why it happens: they both have the same unit of measure. It’s still important to know which is which when trying to troubleshoot a problem.
The one I can’t understand is why people call their computers “hard drives”. It’s possible, I guess, that this got started somewhere and propagated, but, while not exactly common, it seems to be widespread, so I suspect that there’s some logic (to the computer ignorant) that leads to this assumption.
In fact, until I actually encountered people calling the whole box the “hard drive”, I assumed it was one of those “aren’t those users stupid” apocryphal tales like the CR-ROM coffee cup holder.
Cidu Bill Aug 1st 2010 at 10:35 am 34
Most people I know refer to hard drive capacity as “memory” (it does remember stuff, after all) and RAM as either “memory” or “RAM.” But is it really that easy to get confused between the two? If I said my computer has 3 gigabytes of memory — or 300 gigabytes of memory — wouldn’t people generally know what I mean in each case?
George P Aug 1st 2010 at 11:18 am 35
It does remember stuff, yes, but “memory” is not the function it provides on the computer. Queens is on Long Island, but calling it Long Island would just confuse people in any useful situation.
There are plenty of situations where calling hard drive space “memory” can waste time. For example, your aunt calls and says a friend of hers who knows something about computer says she needs to add memory. You ask her why she needs it, and she isn’t sure, but her friend knows a lot about computers and says she needs it. Can you help or not?
She doesn’t know how much she has, so you walk her through checking it out. Then you have her read you the model number of the computer, which takes a while, because it’s under the desk, where it’s dark, and the print is very small, and she keeps reading the wrong numbers, but she finally finds it after ten frustrating minutes.
So you look up that model and find what the maximum memory is, and you compare that to what she has, and you give her the part number and tell her where to buy it.
Two weeks later she calls and says it has arrive, so you walk her through installing the memory in the computer. This takes an even more frustrating thirty minutes, but it’s done, and it tests fine.
Then she calls back the next day and says that she still can’t copy all the pictures off her camera because there still isn’t enough memory.
CIDU Bill Aug 1st 2010 at 11:45 am 36
Nonetheless, George, my aunt will call it “memory,” so I’m going to have top deal with that. In the long run, it’ll be faster than trying to educate her about correct terminology. Personally, I always ask “what isn’t your computer doing that it should be?”
Besides, there are much quicker ways to find out hard drive and RAM capacity than by looking up the model number.
Keera Aug 1st 2010 at 11:58 am 37
George P @33, I think people refer to their computer as the hard drive because back in the day when there were floppy drives as well, you needed to differentiate. The name stuck, I guess, because the hard drive is still with us. And nobody knows what a CPU is, anyway.
Charlene Aug 1st 2010 at 12:49 pm 38
I just won an iPad. It’s strange to think how far we’ve come in one generation - the first computer I used was a Vic-20.
George P Aug 1st 2010 at 12:58 pm 39
Bill, in that scenario that question was asked, it just wasn’t answered, and it wasn’t the aunt who called it “memory” but her friend who is “good with computers”. Many users seem focused on what they think the solution is and get testy when questions are asked to try to find the problem. And the less they know the more certain they are that they are right.
The hardest family members to support over the phone are those who have friends who are “good with computers”. Well, those who have kids who are “good with computers” are worse. OK, worst of all are those who let my uncle touch their computers.
David A. Rooney Aug 1st 2010 at 06:29 pm 40
Read today’s Dilbert - its all a ploy to keep you from moving back home.
meryl a Aug 3rd 2010 at 01:30 am 41
1 - I learned to program in the old days of main frames and in college we played games - if the word boom appeared we were giddy, there were no graphics, color, etc. Boom would appear on paper tape printout. We were told enjoy this while you can, you will never be able to afford to play with a computer or have this much time on one again.
2 - About 12 years ago we were at a 19th century restoration village at a candlelight event with niece, aged about 8, and nephew, about 5. Nephew was fascinated with the bonfire and he and DH were left and niece and I walked about. Niece, who’s dad is high up in IT for corporations, comments to me “They didn’t have computers then.” I agree and go on “No, but they did have computer cards.” (Punch cards were invented for a late 19th century census when they figured out it would take more than 10 years to count the census. They were and are the same size as an 1880’s dollar bill.) Niece replied, as many of you might “What is a computer card?” If you don’t know, in the olden days of main frames we would use a machine to punch holes in a card, one card per line of program. These cards would be feed into an office desk sized machine called a compiler (now done by software) which would produce another stack of cards which we would take to and feed into the actual computer, another desk size machine.
3 - Flashing lights on early computers as shown in movies, had no purpose other than that the first computers shown to the public had lights flashing so people would know they were doing something. (And early computer calculations were in “woman hours” as the computers replaced women (cheaper to employ) in doing extended calculations over long periods of time.
4 - My dad gave me a pen with a calculator and the time in it and explained that it had more computer power than the NASA computers that went to the moon.
5 - Lastly, if you are still with me, in “Take the Money and Run” Woody Allen is trying to get a job and lying to get it. He is asked if he has ever used a “high speed digital computer” He replies that he has and is asked where he did so, “my aunt has one”. This was hilarious at the time, now his aunt would have one.
Cidu Bill Aug 3rd 2010 at 01:41 am 42
What I found funny (though the producers didn’t) was that by the time the Star Trek prequel series Enterprise come on the air, computers were already more advanced and streamlined than they’d been portrayed 40 years earlier in the original series (though the prequel took place 300-odd years earlier). Who knew?
Dave in Boston Aug 3rd 2010 at 01:51 am 43
Mark Dalrymple: I would not say it’s an exciting time to be in software. Retooling everything is massively expensive; nobody has that kind of money. The near future is unlikely to hold much besides stagnation.