The Times Have Changed

[SCraig]

I was sitting at work today holding my little portable disk drive and it got me thinking about days long past.

I worked for an engineering company back in the 80's and 90's and was system manager (that was the previous name for network administrator which was the previous name for IT manager) for their CADD system. We used a DEC VAX 11/785 which was Intergraph's OEM implementation of the VAX 11/780. The computer had (4) 19" wide racks so it was about 6.5' wide by about 6' tall and 4' or so deep. It had far less computing capacity than my cell phone does today. We had to keep everything in a climate-controlled room because everything gave off so much heat. Without a dedicated air conditioning system everything started to overheat after about 30 minutes (I know because our air conditioner failed a few times).

What really got me thinking was the disk drive though. We used two CDC 6775 disk drives that were about 38" tall by 42" deep by 24" wide and weighed 635 pounds each. They ran from 208v 3-phase power and as I recall required a 30-amp dedicated circuit. Their total storage capacity was 675 megabytes each.

My little portable drive runs from 5 volt power from the USB bus, and is about 3" x 4.25" x 0.65" and weighs 7 ounces. It has a capacity of 2 terabytes or the same capacity as about 3,104 of those CDC 6775 drives.

3,104 CDC 6775 drives would weight about 985 tons, use about 27 megawatts of electricity (about 74,000 amps at 208v 3-phase) and would require about 40,332 square feet to house them (they can't be placed right against each other front to back, a 36" depth was required behind them).

I think, but it's been a long time, those drives cost us about $10,000 each so 3,104 of them would have cost $31,040,000 in 1990 dollars as opposed to the $120 I paid for my 2tb portable drive.

The computer would probably be along the same lines as far as cost, size, and computing capacity goes. I suspect my cell phone has several hundred times the computing abilities as that VAX did.

The times have definitely changed!

 

[runnah]

Here is a fun video about exactly that.

 

[480sparky]

I remember when electronic calculators first came out with (gasp!) a square root key! It was "only" $300!

 

[CdTSnap]

I cant quite go that far back, But I do remember the other day finding a "stick of ram" out of my 186 PC i think it was... I believe it was 4MB and it was the size of my D7000 manual, now I have a stick of 16GB memory in my laptop thats about half the size of a credit card. Amazing huh.

I remember when I started developing Android on XDA-Developers and relizing all the things you could do with a phone, The NASA computer that sent the space shuttle to the moon (Apollo 11) had 64 Kilobytes of memory where my Nexus 5 Phone has 2097152 kilobytes (2GB)

 

[480sparky]

........... The NASA computer that sent the space shuttle to the moon ..........

Huh? You been watchin' too many Bruce Willis movies! The shuttles never had the horsepower to break out of earth orbit.

 

[CdTSnap]

Hahahaha

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

[dxqcanada]

Ah I remember working on a PET personal computer ... 8kB of RAM.
I just missed the punch card era.
Then I starting using an Apple II with 32kB, and that had a 5.25" drive !!! Now that was power.

50 years ago, IBM created mainframe that helped send men to the Moon | Ars Technica

 

[SCraig]

Those were the days I still have an old 5-1/4" 5mb hard drive here somewhere as well as a few 8" single-sided floppy disks. I Even have computers that will use the 5mb hard drive and the 8" floppy disks

Sparky, the first calculator I used would NOT do square roots. It was an old Friden rotary calculator and I think it would add, subtract, and multiply but wouldn't even do division. I also remember the first HP electronics calculators. We got one at the engineering company I worked at then and it was the greatest thing in the world. We still had to look up trig values but at least it would multiply and divide and we could take it to a job site

 

[SCraig]

Here is a fun video about exactly that.

That is cool. The vacuum tube era of computers was a bit before my time though.

 

[snowbear]

Scott, you were more advanced than we were -- we had a pair of PDP 11/83s with 256K, a pair of RP06 with 200MB disk pack; running RSX-11. ADM2 terminals (what they used for HAL access in the movie "2010, The Year We Make Contact"); 9600 baud on site, 1200 baud leased data lines (multi-drop with polling) for off site. One of the processor/drive sets was the primary 9-1-1/CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) system, the other was the backup. Someone had to physically move the disk pack from one machine to the other.

I used to decorate the office Christmas tree with 9-track write rings.

 

[Rick58]

I was working at my current job only about a year or two when they bought one of the original IBM 8088 PC's. I remember how cool it was watching to green stick figure with text bubbles giving a fast beginner tutorial of what that baby was capable of doing.
No hard drive. Just a 5" floppy. $1200 1980's dollars! Later they purchased a 10mb HD

 

[SCraig]

Scott, you were more advanced than we were -- we had a pair of PDP 11/83s with 256K, a pair of RP06 with 200MB disk pack; running RSX-11. ADM2 terminals (what they used for HAL access in the movie "2010, The Year We Make Contact"); 9600 baud on site, 1200 baud leased data lines (multi-drop with polling) for off site. One of the processor/drive sets was the primary 9-1-1/CAD (Computer Aided Dispatch) system, the other was the backup. Someone had to physically move the disk pack from one machine to the other.

I used to decorate the office Christmas tree with 9-track write rings.

I had completely forgotten about 9-track write rings I had a zillion of those things around my office. I wish I COULD forget 9-track tapes though. We had two VAX systems and both of them had Cipher 9-track drives that were ALWAYS messing up. We got some Scotch "Black Watch" Tapes once that were supposed to be great. I put the first one on the drive and it wrote for about 30 seconds and then started retrying; back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. I canceled the process and looked at the tape heads and they were completely coated with black media from those stupid tapes. Sent 9 of them back and threw the 10th, the one I had scraped most of the media from the first few feet, in the trash

The VAX 11/785 we had used a PDP-11/03 (I think) as a bootstrap device. That little embedded PDP had to boot and then it booted the 785.

 

[SCraig]

I was working at my current job only about a year or two when they bought one of the original IBM 8088 PC's. I remember how cool it was watching to green stick figure with text bubbles giving a fast beginner tutorial of what that baby was capable of doing.
No hard drive. Just a 5" floppy. $1200 1980's dollars! Later they purchased a 10mb HD

Yep, I remember them to. The original IBM-PC was the state of the art at that time.

We ordered a couple of DEC Rainbow desktops with 5mb disk drives. When we got them they had 10 or 20mb drives in them and when I called to see what was going on I was told that the 5mb were discontinued because the larger ones were the same price.

 

[JacaRanda]

I have a Texas Instruments TI-99 in my moms garage and hopefully the cassette player I needed for backing who knows what up.

I also have a superdisk reader and disks out in the garage. They held 120 megs. They were going to compete with the Zip drives because they were so thin. Wow.

 

[snowbear]

I remember the "Black Watch" -- gunk up a tape head like crazy. I got into the habit of wiping the heads down after every tape.

Anyone remember the "Pet" computers? They were made by CBM, before the Commodore 64.