And then remembering taking forever to save anything on a school computer, only for the floppy to read half the file and die when I got home. It's amazing - maybe it was the crappy quality of floppies I was using, or maybe I was using them for too long, but for me, regularly not being able to read data back off a floppy was a fact of life. Times have definitely changed for the better :)
I started in computing with an Apple II+ (not really - my II+ was only the first to have floppies). I always wondered why those poor CP/M (and MSX) users had to put up with such nonsense as drive letters ;-)
I started out with an Amiga before moving to the PC. The Amiga (while still dealing with device-roots) at least had a more flexible system.
fd0: was floppy 1. If you had an additional drive, that would be fd1: etc. The best part was that you could also access devices by file-system label, so if you needed to make sure you were accessing not only a floppy, but the device labelled "WorkbenchExtras" you would simply do WorkbenchExtras:
Needless to say, this made multi-disk tasks & scripting rather pleasant, easy and cut out lots of boilerplate and checking.
It was a nice system and I kinda miss it.
Edit: df0: was floppy 1. dh0: was first harddrive, etc. Not that in changes much.
I have to agree with you. Only now I got to play with an Amiga (a 500 became part of my collection) and it's really very sophisticated for the time it was released.
Just to imagine most today's PCs deal with cruft that dates back to the CP/M days is... disgusting.
Apple's ProDOS also had something like that - the volumes were named and you accessed files with /VOLUMENAME/FILE.DAT paths.
Don't forget the ASSIGN utility which created new device roots from one (or more!) existing folders, or with deferrment i.e. when assigning Fonts: to df0:Fonts, the OS remembers the disk referred to, and will ask you for that specific disk if you remove it and subsequently access Fonts:. It made working with floppies a lot more pleasant.
SUBST on Windows is similar, but with 1/10th of the power and just single drive letters.
I miss the Amiga too, but it simply never kept up the pace.
I think it was overcome by PCs when they started offering VGA graphics. The Amiga architecture was much more "intimate" with video generation than PCs and, thus, were not so easy upgrade as newer hardware became available.
IIRC on the Apple the floppies were normally S6D1 and S6D2 (if you had two), unless you installed your floppy controller card in a slot other than Slot 6, which was the norm.
That would be DOS 3.x. You could specify a file under (Apple's) DOS with "long_filename,S6,D1". File names could have up to 33 chars and had type information (one byte) so as not to rely on naming conventions.
My 33 figure was wrong (either me or Wikipedia). Maybe the directory entry had 33 bytes (30 for the file name, 1 for type, and two for track and sector)
Worse, my current computer has an A:\ drive. I don't know why I keep a 3.5" floppy drive around, exactly, because I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years, but I do have one.
And that's nothing compared to the 8088 that's collecting dust. It has two floppy drives, a 10 MB (yes, MB, not GB) hard drive, a CGA card & monitor, a math coprocessor and as much RAM as it can hold.
I don't know if it still works, though. It did work roughly a decade ago, which is the last time it was actually turned on.
Pity we got rid of the Apple ][ GS back in the 90s. It might be a collector's item by now.
It does sound like an XT. The first PC I used was an XT-286; the precursor to the AT. It had a massive 20 MB hard drive!
I still recall that the expensive accounting software for which my father purchased the computer required an ISA card to run it. Now that's anti-piracy!
You are correct about the clock speed, but not the bus difference.
"In 1986, the XT/286 (IBM 5162) with a 6 MHz Intel 80286 processor was introduced. This system actually turned out to be faster than the ATs of the time using 8 MHz 286 processors due to the fact that it had zero wait state RAM that could move data more quickly."
I think it's PC-XT. I added a lot of those parts with bits I found in a Hamfest back in the 90s. It's been mothballed for ages because I have nowhere to put it so I've honestly forgotten.
Mine broke when the eject failed, I used a paper clip to pull it out, but lost the paper clip. When it started smoking I had to pull the floppy's power - thankfully I had the side open to my computer so I didn't have to turn the whole thing off before I caused an actual fire.
I'm in my early twenties, and this makes me feel old too. I have an 8088 too (which contains both an A and a B drive), I should fire it up again. Though mine has a Hercules graphics adaptor (everything is green!)
In industry, that may be so (I seem to recall one of the Star Wars prequels being the first feature movie done entirely with digital cameras). For end-user video cameras (handicams, or whatnot), we've been storing to magnetic tape for a good bit longer though.
Being digital doesn't mean using solid state storage. Magnetic tape is probably still the most used medium for digital video cameras. For example, Betacam SX is still used.
I was in the same boat. My son found an old disposable camera in a drawer, and I couldn't find a decent way to explain it to him with out the WTF? look on his face.
Ha! I took a Hungarian class with my daughter a couple of years ago; I think she was 8, which is why she needed me to sit in with her, given it was a college class at IU. (I should explain that her mother is Hungarian, and so this was more in the way of language practice and grammar instruction, not that my daughter is a super-genius. Although, of course, she is.)
Anyway, one of the dialog exercises was to talk about hobbies, and one of the hobbies was record collections, with a picture. She had absolutely no idea what the picture was supposed to be, until I explained to her that they were like CDs. The other students in the class exploded with laughter.
On a recent vacation I was photographing my nieces and nephew making funny faces. After the first shots they ran up behind me, looked at the back of the camera, and said, "Can I see?" They gave me bewildered looks when I told them it was a film camera and they'd have to wait a few weeks.
My god - that's a blast from the past. I actually credit the fact I ended up studying history to the 'Doomsday disc' the produced in the UK... would love to see a copy now. Do people still have the hardware knocking around?
The student who knew grew up in a household full of 'em. Videophiles find advantages in LaserDiscs over DVD: http://www.starlaser.com/dvd-lasr.htm and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laserdisc#Comparison_with_DVD. Jacket art and possible increased quality due to uncompressed video are cited. I didn't know LaserDisc was an analog format! LaserDisc has some of the grooviness of the 8-track, if not the deep catalog of the LP.
One of my nieces was photographed by her grandmother with a film camera, and immediately ran to her, expecting to see the picture on the back of the camera. On learning that wasn't possible, she exclaimed "oh, it's not working".
Friend of mine was trying to fix an ancient computer that had a 5¼" floppy drive. He thought it was a slot loading CD drive. The CD is stuck in there now.
I remember having an Amstrad 640k. Two 5 1/4 floppy drives, no hard disk. Booting it up involved putting in about 5 disks one after the other and took about 20 minutes.
Performance was terrible, but this was real 3D with a cool atmosphere.
My Quake came on a CD though ... which I loved because of the included Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.
I just used the CD trick when playing multiplayer. You start the game with the disc in one computer and then eject and run into the next room to start the game on that computer.
I think 9/10ths of the games I played with my brother were exploited with this trick until the warez scenes started developing proper and timely released nocd cracks.
Why? Westwood were probably the only game company that understood this problem, and shipped their games on two CDs (allies and soviets), even if the content was mostly identical, and could all easily fit on one, just so that two people could play at once.
It wasn't a particular problem with Westwood games, although it was when we got another player involved. I was thinking more of Age of Empires when actually saying that, I remember getting a 3-way going using a single disc.
We managed a 7-player at school, but that was using 2 discs.
Haha you just reminded me that we used to do this same trick for tribes 2 at a friend's house. We'd play online, too, so every time the map changed on the server, we'd have to run back and forth to load the new map.
This reminds me that even us twenty-somethings may one day be made every bit as clumsy and baffled by whatever comes up 30 years from now as our own proverbial mothers are today...
Quite fascinating how some design decisions tend to stick due to technical or other reasons. We will probably still run Windows 2020 on the C-drive. Sometimes the reason is backwards compatiblity, other times it's something that requires a huge redesign of an entire system.
But, most of the time I think it's because people simply think that this is the way things are supposed to be. One example is how long it took before Auto-ISO became an option on DSLRs.
In all cases there are opportunities for a startup to be disruptive. So, keep looking for those C-drives!
A massive pile of legacy Windows stuff probably assumes C: is the boot volume.
Windows has always had extensive backward compatibility, even if it requires tweaking to run 9x programs on XP and up. I often wonder how much better Windows could be if Microsoft were to choose to repeat OS X's innovation, which was almost completely severing backward compatibility.
When you read it as 'a massive pile of legacy Windows applications', which is reasonable, it's not a stretch to assume that many applications written in the last 20 years assume that the OS is on a harddisk, and on C: for that matter.
Prior to Windows 95 the preponderance of Windows programs were 16bit. Seeing as 16bit programs are not compatible with recent versions of Windows one can be reasonably assured that they are not in that vast pool of legacy applications.
Hand in hand with 32bit Windows came the registry, which is where most applications stored configuration information until relatively recent times.
To the best of my recollection, I have not seen an application or utility hard coded to C: since Windows 95. But I would be interested to learn of the actual examples which support your assumptions.
Most code was written for internal systems. So even if you don't encounter them there are plenty of hard coded paths including drive letter in plenty of systems.
Hard coded paths are possible with any operating system, including OSX which was mentioned in the post to which I responded. And when dealing with it, assigning C: to the bootable drive is a feature of a particular implementation, not a legacy of the Operating System. So far as I am aware, no part of recent Windows versions are required to be installed on C:
Many games and apps may run on other than the C: drive, but odd things are broken - configuration changes don't stick, temp files fail to be written etc.
One might wonder why the first two letters are for floppy and not HDD. If you follow the drive letters, going from A to higher alphabets generally give you evolution of technology (ignoring network map Z:).
Because MsDos, at least in its early versions, could not dynamically assign new drive letters to newly inserted disks. So the workaround, which is still with us years later in Windows 7, was to reserve at boot time the first two letters (A/B) for drives with removable media (i.e., floppy drives, there were no usb flash dongles in those days).
And this was perfected in Windows 95 which always had drive A:\ visible in My Computer even on computers without actual floppy drive (in that case it was named "Removable drive", had generic removable drive icon and did nothing useful).
My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying normal 3.5" disks, stamping holes in them and selling them as pristine 3.5" HD disks. Let's just say it was less successful than I'd hoped.
My point was that formatting a 800kb disk to 1600kb (as you could on the Archimedes) is likely to - and in my experience has - corrupt after a few days of use, and thus is not worth the amount of money saved.
Luckily it was just copied games that got corrupted, but it could have been worse.
My first stab at being an entrepreneur was buying up used floppies for pennies slapping a blank label on them and selling them for $1 a piece. But I was a pushover so most people could bargain me down to $2-3 for a pack of five.
My aunt did one better: she used a scissors to reformat a 5.25" disk as a 3.5" one. (Lesson learned: be excessively cautious when giving instructions.)
OT: You are just the second person I've ever heard say "a scissors" (with an article). Is this a regional thing (like waiting "on line" vs. "in line")?
Square hole punches cost money. Scissors are already lying around the house. Sure, the results weren't pretty, but then pretty was not the stated goal.
This was for 5 1/4" floppies, naturally. By the time 3 1/2" was the standard, I had a job and could simply requisition them as needed.
I remember getting a few funny looks from the stores in the Electrical Engineering department when I requisitioned a few (probably at least five) boxes of 3 1/2" floppies so I could install Linux (Slackware) complete with a pretty full X11 environment (I'm pretty sure X and its apps was split over at least 12 floppies).
I have a USB stick with a write-protect switch. Unfortunately, the switch has broken. Now the drive will contain 128MB of obsolete early-00s data until the bits diffuse away.
On some SD cards in some SD readers, the write-lock switch is too small to trigger the mechanical switch in the reader, making the card appear as read-only until tape is applied over the switch. This problem affects my BeagleBoard's OS SD card.
This makes me remember elementary school and saving stuff on floppies, and that i have Sango fighter on floppies in a drawer somewhere. They really do not make games as good as they were before!
Aw, man. I turned 32 on Friday, which is 224 in developer years, and have spent the last couple of days consoling myself that everything's fine, I'm not past it, etc etc. And now this. Thank you, Hacker News. Thank you so much. I am as old as dust and time and the fabric of the universe. Now I know how all those COBOL programmers felt.
* It was actually eight thousand years later, not the year 2000. Technology had advanced to such a degree that everyone had virtual reality interfaces which allowed them to contact anyone else on the planet.*
This joke needs to be adjusted for the times. It should say 10 years not 8000.
This thread had the opposite effect on me. I see all these "old folks" responses and think "now we get to see who the REAL rockstars are."
When we're talking about 100 core cell phones and Clojure, in many ways the teenagers and the old hands are on more equal footing. Then someone busts out "and then I reverse engineered the tape drive with an oscillascope" and I'm like.... "Respect."
I look forward to one day being the old hack who can say shit like that.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect ubiquitous wireless connectivity of one kind or another, and cloud storage. As for what form the device might take, who knows? It would have been pretty hard to predict smartphones in 1990; I expect further consolidation of devices, but have no idea what they'll look like.
I'd agree that caching is important, but when, realistically, would you not have any sort of wireless access in 20 years? Driving? Many cars these days have hard drives; it's easy to see that becoming more prevalent as storage gets even cheaper. The people designing mobile devices aren't worried about a single farmer in the middle of Saskatchewan. Cell phone providers didn't even bother with the whole of Saskatchewan for a number of years.
If you can get a cell signal, you can get streaming media, or at least you will be able to. I don't see that being much of a problem.
I live in Australia and already try to live mostly in the cloud. I have more than enough mobile data transferring > 5Mbps anywhere that I happen to be to live completely on cloud-based technologies if such technologies existed for all my requirements.
Living in NYC and traveling almost exclusively by subway makes me appreciate my local storage. In time there will be wireless underground, but for now, it's necessary to store music and podcasts on local storage. The AT&T 2 GB limit per month also encourages the need for local storage.
Physical limits are a major component of latency. Until we figure out a way to transmit information instantly with infinite bandwidth, local storage will always be a significant factor.
edit: And given trends in solid-state drives, local storage will be cheaper and more energy efficient than a wireless network for a long time.
If it takes an hour to copy a terabyte of data to a tape, put it in a car, drive to a location and read the tape, you just transported 8796093022208 bits in 3600 seconds, or about 2443359173 bits/second.
edit: I always understood the quote as "the [potential] bandwidth"- the bandwidth that can be available using the station wagon as physical infrastructure.
Unless I'm wrong, they've measured both: Latency is 1 hour (time it takes a packet to go from source to destination), bandwidth is that number they quoted.
Latency is greater than 1 hour, if it takes an hour to copy the data to the tapes. You've got to get them to the destination and copy them off after that.
>If it takes an hour to copy a terabyte of data to a tape, put it in a car, drive to a location and read the tape
That's 1 hr latency, unless I'm mistaken. Latency doesn't include disk operations on the client side, does it? Is latency time between a signal being sent and received, or between sent, received, and acknowledgement sent/received?
ie, is latency time(client->SYN->server->SYNACK->client->ACK->server), or time(client->SYN->server)?
Latency is 1 hour, but to get bandwidth you need to divide not by 1 hour but by the time between successive station wagon departures. For example if you only have one station wagon and driving back after copying the tapes takes a further 30 minutes, then the denominator is 5400 seconds and so the system bandwidth is 50% less than the number quoted.
>edit: And given trends in solid-state drives, local storage will be cheaper and more energy efficient than a wireless network for a long time.
At some point, though, you get diminishing returns. If all you're doing is playing mp3s at 192 kbit/s, existing wireless is fine and future wireless will be more than adequate. There's no need to add the expense of putting local storage on a mobile device if you can achieve the same end cheaper with cloud hosting.
Now, this is all academic, as we're talking about a radio, and I don't think they're likely to be around by then. Whether or not a device includes local storage will be an economic decision given its intended usage and market conditions of the time, which nobody can predict with great certainty.
I must be a ancient, because I remember having to identify which side of the floppy I wanted to use!
On the BBC Micro, the first drive had sides 0 and 2; the second drive had sides 1 and 3. And I was lucky to have two drives. I only saw HDs on magazines.
How about having to notch the other side of a single sided floppy to make it double sided. Or even having to put tape over a notch to make it read-only. I remember those little black pieces of tape that came with a box of floppies to make the read-only.
One day you'll have to take your kids to a museum to show them a CRT monitor (and they will have to take their kids to a museum to show them an incandescent light bulb).
I'm turning 30 in April and sometimes I feel like an old dog. Nevertheless, the article made my day, I can't stop laughing over it and the comments, esp. the Penny Arcade link in this thread. Cheers =)
My first computer didn't have disk drives at all - it used standard audio cassette tapes in standard audio cassette machines. I remember feeding the audio into an oscilliscope and reverse engineering the format used on the tape, then writing Z80 machine code (I didn't have an assember - I wrote actual hex opcodes and fed them into a program I wrote that read hex and poked the values into memory) to create tapes that then overwrote the stack and booted me into a machine code monitor.
Then I wrote a Forth operating system.
This was on a 16KB machine (I had the expansion pack) with a 1.7MHz Z80.
Fun days. I still have the machine and its complete circuit diagram. I should get it out again, but then again, I don't have time:
I loved the TRS-80. We had some in my Jr High. We had an assignment to create some large ASCII art via hundreds of print statements and then print it out on the dot matrix printer.
A few years ago I went back to school for a bit. One day I was sitting with my classmates, average age about 18, discussing our first computers. I mentioned I got started on a Vic 20 with a tape drive. Suggested someone, "Was that so you could listen to music while you coded?". Took some effort to convince them I wasn't pulling their leg when I told them that it was used to save programmes to
Ahh the Vic 20. Warms my heart just hearing about it :) My parents bribed me to do some stuff when I was younger with the reward of a floppy disk drive. I was living like a boss when I got that drive!
Still got mine, and a box of cartridges. Hacked the paddles into an some electronics experiment years ago, and the RF modulator's given up the ghost, but other than that still all good. Even still got the book, minus the back cover
Does that mean you still have a Commodore 64? (Seems like everyone upgraded -- I mean, 64 freaking K!!!). Course you only got to use 49K of it, but still!
Still got mine too. Still worked as of a few years ago when I dragged it out of the attic. Even got all the books, games I had copied from the BBSes, and a few cartridges. I should pull it out to see how well my 300 baud modem works on today's Internet.
I also have a VIC-20, although I bought mine from a thrift store maybe 4 years ago or so.
The Commodore RF modulator that came with it was no good either, but I replaced the electrolytic capacitor inside with a new one and it seems to work pretty well now...
oh man! You had a tape drive for your vic 20? when i bought games they came as a book and i had to type the assembly instructions in for 3 hours if i wanted to play!
Ahh yes... did you have it to close to the TV, or were you too loud? I remember yelling at friends, "Man, you were talking too loud! That's why it didn't load. We gotta reload... 30 more minutes!!! Sheesh!"
I had something similar (a later model, if I'm guessing right). The problem with mine was that the 3.5mm jack socket on the machine had a loose contact, so I had to apply pressure for the whole time things were loading off tape. If I let it slip even slightly, I wouldn't necessarily know about it until 5 or 10 minutes later when the damn thing finished loading and just didn't work.
Ah yes, saving data onto a cassette tape. My parents purchased an Atari 1200XL in the early 80s and when I was about five years old, I quickly hijacked it to play games and eventually learn how to write code. For the longest time I wondered what the cassette drive was for; why would you play music on your Atari? Then I realized, "Wait a minute! I can store data and turn the computer off?!"
My first computer (an ABC80, with impressive 78 x 72 pixel b/w graphics!) didn't even have cassette tapes. I'd spend a few days writing a program, and then I'd have fun with it until I shut the computer off, at which point it was gone forever. Although for the best games I created, I used to transcribe the code by hand into booklets.
We had a TI-99 with a tape drive-a standard tape player that you would set next to the Mic input on the computer, get the volume just right, and hit Play.
My dad and his friend used to send programs to each other late at night via HAM radio. One would hold the mic keyed next to the tape player playing back the ASCII and the other one would hold the speaker up to the computer's input and load the data.
This was in the early 80's. I think maybe they invented PACKET or something.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadAnd then remembering taking forever to save anything on a school computer, only for the floppy to read half the file and die when I got home. It's amazing - maybe it was the crappy quality of floppies I was using, or maybe I was using them for too long, but for me, regularly not being able to read data back off a floppy was a fact of life. Times have definitely changed for the better :)
Out of curiosity, I just googled for prices and it seems prices stayed about the same since I bought the last pack.
Not only reuse but be pleasantly surprised yet irritated at the same time because suddenly the disk was magically usable again!
fd0: was floppy 1. If you had an additional drive, that would be fd1: etc. The best part was that you could also access devices by file-system label, so if you needed to make sure you were accessing not only a floppy, but the device labelled "WorkbenchExtras" you would simply do WorkbenchExtras:
Needless to say, this made multi-disk tasks & scripting rather pleasant, easy and cut out lots of boilerplate and checking.
It was a nice system and I kinda miss it.
Edit: df0: was floppy 1. dh0: was first harddrive, etc. Not that in changes much.
Just to imagine most today's PCs deal with cruft that dates back to the CP/M days is... disgusting.
Apple's ProDOS also had something like that - the volumes were named and you accessed files with /VOLUMENAME/FILE.DAT paths.
SUBST on Windows is similar, but with 1/10th of the power and just single drive letters.
I miss the Amiga too, but it simply never kept up the pace.
I just thought it might be slightly out of scope for the discussion at large, so I decided not to include it ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_DOS
My 33 figure was wrong (either me or Wikipedia). Maybe the directory entry had 33 bytes (30 for the file name, 1 for type, and two for track and sector)
Worse, my current computer has an A:\ drive. I don't know why I keep a 3.5" floppy drive around, exactly, because I haven't actually put a floppy in there in years, but I do have one.
And that's nothing compared to the 8088 that's collecting dust. It has two floppy drives, a 10 MB (yes, MB, not GB) hard drive, a CGA card & monitor, a math coprocessor and as much RAM as it can hold.
I don't know if it still works, though. It did work roughly a decade ago, which is the last time it was actually turned on.
Pity we got rid of the Apple ][ GS back in the 90s. It might be a collector's item by now.
I still recall that the expensive accounting software for which my father purchased the computer required an ISA card to run it. Now that's anti-piracy!
False.
"In 1986, the XT/286 (IBM 5162) with a 6 MHz Intel 80286 processor was introduced. This system actually turned out to be faster than the ATs of the time using 8 MHz 286 processors due to the fact that it had zero wait state RAM that could move data more quickly."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer_XT
I have one computer (a Sun workstation) with a 3.5 drive that no longer works. The fun part is I cannot tell you in what year it broke.
I think this was back in the early 2000's.
hums the california games chiptune
Anyway, one of the dialog exercises was to talk about hobbies, and one of the hobbies was record collections, with a picture. She had absolutely no idea what the picture was supposed to be, until I explained to her that they were like CDs. The other students in the class exploded with laughter.
Ah those were the days.
Performance was terrible, but this was real 3D with a cool atmosphere. My Quake came on a CD though ... which I loved because of the included Nine Inch Nails soundtrack.
10 fps 3D action!
I think 9/10ths of the games I played with my brother were exploited with this trick until the warez scenes started developing proper and timely released nocd cracks.
We managed a 7-player at school, but that was using 2 discs.
But, most of the time I think it's because people simply think that this is the way things are supposed to be. One example is how long it took before Auto-ISO became an option on DSLRs.
In all cases there are opportunities for a startup to be disruptive. So, keep looking for those C-drives!
Windows has always had extensive backward compatibility, even if it requires tweaking to run 9x programs on XP and up. I often wonder how much better Windows could be if Microsoft were to choose to repeat OS X's innovation, which was almost completely severing backward compatibility.
Seeing as Windows has been bootable from removable drives and over networks for a long time, I sincerely doubt it.
Hand in hand with 32bit Windows came the registry, which is where most applications stored configuration information until relatively recent times.
To the best of my recollection, I have not seen an application or utility hard coded to C: since Windows 95. But I would be interested to learn of the actual examples which support your assumptions.
I used to have Windows on C:, Program Files on D: and My Documents on E:. Everything broke, to an approximation.
Even if writing code to require it is trivial.
Get off my lawn.
A: - floppy C:/D: - HDD E: - CD/DVD F: - External Storage
Luckily it was just copied games that got corrupted, but it could have been worse.
This was for 5 1/4" floppies, naturally. By the time 3 1/2" was the standard, I had a job and could simply requisition them as needed.
This would have been late '93 or so.
write-lock: prevent it from beint written (and acquiring viruses)
read-lock: prevent it from being read (and passing viruses), only showing the free space and being able to write only in the free space
http://www.wiebetech.com/products/USB-WriteBlocker.php
Lets just say whoever posted the question is a newb :)
http://thejokeshop.org/2008/12/as-useful-as-a-cobol-programm...
This joke needs to be adjusted for the times. It should say 10 years not 8000.
The last line: "COBOL is forever" gets me every time. =)
When we're talking about 100 core cell phones and Clojure, in many ways the teenagers and the old hands are on more equal footing. Then someone busts out "and then I reverse engineered the tape drive with an oscillascope" and I'm like.... "Respect."
I look forward to one day being the old hack who can say shit like that.
If it makes you feel any better, I'm 37, which is like 259 in developer years.
Look at remote places in Canada or Australia.
Local data caching is important.
If you can get a cell signal, you can get streaming media, or at least you will be able to. I don't see that being much of a problem.
edit: And given trends in solid-state drives, local storage will be cheaper and more energy efficient than a wireless network for a long time.
Bandwidth (in the sense intended here) is measured in bits/second: how do you measure that from a station wagon [full of mag tapes]?
Now a freeway full of station wagons ... that has bandwidth.
edit: I always understood the quote as "the [potential] bandwidth"- the bandwidth that can be available using the station wagon as physical infrastructure.
And secondly, you just measured latency there, not bandwidth.
That's 1 hr latency, unless I'm mistaken. Latency doesn't include disk operations on the client side, does it? Is latency time between a signal being sent and received, or between sent, received, and acknowledgement sent/received?
ie, is latency time(client->SYN->server->SYNACK->client->ACK->server), or time(client->SYN->server)?
At some point, though, you get diminishing returns. If all you're doing is playing mp3s at 192 kbit/s, existing wireless is fine and future wireless will be more than adequate. There's no need to add the expense of putting local storage on a mobile device if you can achieve the same end cheaper with cloud hosting.
Now, this is all academic, as we're talking about a radio, and I don't think they're likely to be around by then. Whether or not a device includes local storage will be an economic decision given its intended usage and market conditions of the time, which nobody can predict with great certainty.
On the BBC Micro, the first drive had sides 0 and 2; the second drive had sides 1 and 3. And I was lucky to have two drives. I only saw HDs on magazines.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Okona-GfhR-TRS-80.jpg
One day you'll have to take your kids to a museum to show them a CRT monitor (and they will have to take their kids to a museum to show them an incandescent light bulb).
Thanks, AOL!
Which is why I'm waiting with baited breath for the release of this thing:
http://retromaster.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/cumulus-firmware...
So I can really have something cool about computers to teach my 3-year old in a decade or so! :)
Then I wrote a Forth operating system.
This was on a 16KB machine (I had the expansion pack) with a 1.7MHz Z80.
Fun days. I still have the machine and its complete circuit diagram. I should get it out again, but then again, I don't have time:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2095231
Been there, done that ;)
But this one also featured a 3.5" floppy drive: http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=...
Sadly I sold it to a friend at some point.
The Commodore RF modulator that came with it was no good either, but I replaced the electrolytic capacitor inside with a new one and it seems to work pretty well now...
Actually I was too young to know what was going on; my dad setup the tape thing.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Castle_%28game%29
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MSX
My life was complete.
My dad and his friend used to send programs to each other late at night via HAM radio. One would hold the mic keyed next to the tape player playing back the ASCII and the other one would hold the speaker up to the computer's input and load the data.
This was in the early 80's. I think maybe they invented PACKET or something.