Snavenai
Chris PirilloThis is what 5 megabytes looked like in 1956. #tech #history #retro #retrocomputing #technology #histodons #photo
Dan the 3D Printing Dad@ChrisPirillo I saw one of the platters from one of the early hard drives at the local IBM plant, years back, when I worked summers there. They were HUGE. Hard to imagine them spinning. The potential energy in those things must have been something else.
Mario@ChrisPirillo at least you didn’t need to flip it over twice before it fitted on the slot.
Studio 8502 
@ChrisPirillo Well, when the smallest transistor you can lay hands on is the size of a light bulb, that seems normal.
J.R. Orci@ChrisPirillo Can it play Zork?
Jason, Human, Average 
@ChrisPirillo
Our drives are the size of a thumb. Their drives, if handled incorrectly, could remove a thumb.
Our drives are the size of a thumb. Their drives, if handled incorrectly, could remove a thumb.
Prickly Pam (D-PA)And, IIRC, if you dropped one the platter inside would shatter.
Esoter1k 👑@ChrisPirillo You're kidding right? Wait... that's for real? Oh snap!
5MB of big-ass cabinet of a computer. 😳
5MB of big-ass cabinet of a computer. 😳
That's for real.
And that's just the memory.
There were whole other big-ass cabinets that held printers, card readers, tape drives, and disc drives.
It was a whole different world.
Not to mention the three TV channels you got... If you adjusted the antenna just right.
Christopher Duffley - KC1WXP@ChrisPirillo Oo hell! I bet!
Chris Trottier@ChrisPirillo I wonder what 5MB looks like today.
djohngo@atomicpoet @ChrisPirillo Way smaller than a grain of rice if Bloomberg is to be believed.
octt 
@djohngo @atomicpoet
Consider that the most dense (commercial-grade) storage media we have today is the 1 TB microSD card; that's 10^12 bytes.
According to Wikipedia, a microSD is 15 mm × 11 mm × 1 mm large, which is a volume of 165 mm³.. or 165 * 10^9 um³ (cubic micrometers).
Actually that physical space doesn't only hold bits, as the actual flash chip is a bit smaller (you can get an idea of its size from this picture: https://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/microsd_lineup.jpg), but, for the sake of argument, let's calculate storage density based on the size of the entire card.
Well, let's divide the volume by the bytes.. and we get that 1 byte is 0.165 um³.
Finally, knowing that 5 MB is 5 * 10^6 bytes, we can calculate that 5 MB is 825000 um³, or 0.000825 mm³.
If my calculations are actually correct then I'd say that "smaller than a grain of rice" isn't doing it justice AT ALL! 😅
@ChrisPirillo
Consider that the most dense (commercial-grade) storage media we have today is the 1 TB microSD card; that's 10^12 bytes.
According to Wikipedia, a microSD is 15 mm × 11 mm × 1 mm large, which is a volume of 165 mm³.. or 165 * 10^9 um³ (cubic micrometers).
Actually that physical space doesn't only hold bits, as the actual flash chip is a bit smaller (you can get an idea of its size from this picture: https://bunniestudios.com/blog/images/microsd_lineup.jpg), but, for the sake of argument, let's calculate storage density based on the size of the entire card.
Well, let's divide the volume by the bytes.. and we get that 1 byte is 0.165 um³.
Finally, knowing that 5 MB is 5 * 10^6 bytes, we can calculate that 5 MB is 825000 um³, or 0.000825 mm³.
If my calculations are actually correct then I'd say that "smaller than a grain of rice" isn't doing it justice AT ALL! 😅
@ChrisPirillo
WildKippers@ChrisPirillo - in the early 1970s I used an Elliott 803 - fed it punched tape to do bugger all. Upgraded to an ICL 1900 series using punched cards … Data storage was expensive. How things have changed .. I was a crap programmer btw ..
CautionWIP 🎃+🇨🇦+🏳️🌈= 
@ChrisPirillo Yessiree kids, when I was a youngu'un, a Megabyte was a MEGABYTE! Not like those puny megabytes you get nowadays. You kids just don't know what it used to be like when the original megabytes roamed the plains, eating silicon and pooping out CPUs...those were the days.
Kids : Mooooom! Grampy's talking about megabytes again! Can we unplug him for the night? Please?!
Kids : Mooooom! Grampy's talking about megabytes again! Can we unplug him for the night? Please?!
Lester Thomas@cautionwip @ChrisPirillo Megabytes!?!! You young whippersnappers and your megabytes. Back in my day we had kilobytes and we were dang happy to have them.
@tco0085 @ChrisPirillo I have vivid memories of a BBS called Walden Commune in Mtl that stuck with 300 baud long after higher speeds existed and I could keep up with the dl text as it scrolled by.
Howard@cautionwip @ChrisPirillo Remember when we had to dial up to find our toots? It was called CompuServe and Boards. If you think 5G is slow, this was about 1/250th G.
😂
(((JaneinNJ)))
tolortslubor@ChrisPirillo This is what 15 lists of significant events in the history of the universe look like, when plotted as points on a log-log graph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events.svg
Jeff Shannon@ChrisPirillo I remember when my friend Dave had meg in his Amiga and all I had was 640k. He was all like, I can type a note in a word processor and format a disk at the same time and I was like why would anyone ever want to do that? I didn;t see him for like a whole 30 years and I ran into him where I worked. We said hi. And then you know what he said? "I had a meg."
Mudd ~: 
@ChrisPirillo Back in my day we had megabytes! 1024 Kilobytes! Not one of them there maybebytes! ..mehbibytes.. 1000 kilos + 24 missing informations!
Deborah Rose@ChrisPirillo As a teenager, I worked part-time after school for the IRS as a keypunch operator during tax season. I was given a stack of tax returns, and I transferred data by punching holes in IBM cards that got fed into a computer that took up the entire wall.
@DebErupts ...that's incredible.
AnthonyUplandpoetWatkins
Gemlike Flame@AnthonyUplandpoetWatkins @DebErupts @ChrisPirillo
PL/1 RJE JCL FTW
Anathema Device@ChrisPirillo I bought a 10mb HD in 1991 (for a fabulous price too) and it was the size of a complete edition of shakespeare :) Now we send photos that size over email!
@Lee_in_Iowa@ChrisPirillo As a kid, I remember hearing there’d be a computer in every home by the 21st century—and I thought to myself, everyone will have to add another room to their house for it!
Catherine Novak@Lee_in_Iowa @ChrisPirillo ... having no idea many of us would run around with our computers in our pockets, or the palm of our hand. And each of those would be more powerful than the mainframes of our childhood
Stephen D’Arcy@cnovak @Lee_in_Iowa @ChrisPirillo And even more powerful than the computers that put humanity on the moon.
Jim Infantino@ChrisPirillo are you sure? Back then each bit was a vacuum tube. I don’t see how that would hold 40 million vacuum tubes.
Mila Araujo
RoseFromNJ/Philly@ChrisPirillo In the mid1970s, I worked for a local newspaper in a small town. One of my jobs was to proofread by feeding yellow tapes into a machine, making corrections, and, if I recall correctly, taking out a new tape with the corrected copy. No idea what the machine was called but even then it felt creaky!
kira :3@ChrisPirillo they should have made it smaller honestly
Phil Landmeier@ChrisPirillo I assume that unit is a rotating magnetic memory of some kind. In 1973, I worked with the largest member of IBM's 370 line, a 370/168. The 4 megabytes of high-speed (80 ns) main memory that it had occupied a box about that size. Hahahaha.
Just 14 years later I had IBM's first 386-based desktop with 4 megs of RAM and roughly the same compute power as the 370/168 I had used long before.
fmc01@ChrisPirillo I recall using a tape recorder for programs because the TI 99/4A came with a whopping 16K of memory.
Michal Nemecek@ChrisPirillo the fact that the protein bar sized SSD that's in my laptop 66 years later has 100 000 times more storage is amazing.
@ChrisPirillo and 66 years later, a protein bar sized stick of silicon in my laptop has 100 000 times more storage. Amazing how far we've come.
PeterD 🇩🇪 🇨🇦@ChrisPirillo Yup. Brings back fond memories.
Oh, yeah.
I was a programmer in the 1980s.
We ran the work of an entire bank on two machines. One had 1 meg and the other had 4 megs.
We called the 4 meg machine "the big machine."
When a program crapped out, it gave us a register number and an offset, both in hexadecimal.
Then we added the offset to the contents of the register to zero in on which program line had failed.
It was good fun when you got called in to the bank to do this in the middle of the night.
Jen Newmeyer, CFRE