1st Online Experience?

[FlyingClayDisk]

yagh zooks here get all the 'memberberries out your system
https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipb...talog.html

[Image: https://denyignorance.com/uploader/image...-47-22.png]

Isn't  that great???  That many years ago we thougth 32k RAM was awesome.  Today, we bitch about anything less than 32mb of RAM.  I have (3) laptops, and (2) of them have 32 gb of RAM.  Those were cool back "in the day" but now we have hyper-threading, over-clocking and multiple process "cores" which renders just raw RAM almost obsolete.  Used to be people measured PC chips on processor chip clock speed...now it's a whole different equation.  Raw clock speed means almost nothing now.

How far we've come.

[jaded]

First experience,hmmmm

Early 90's staring @ my husbands commodore just sitting there.
It was cute, unfathomable but cute.

Moved onto my first Mac laptop in the mid-90's.
Hubby got the obligatory Microsoft setup. I have never been so disapointed in my life.
The ridiculous arrows at the left of every post, the time lag. Being a child of old sci-fy I was incensed this was the best we could do.
AOL sukd

Mid 90's with the Mac I immediately discovered Museums had their own websites an I could tool thru their guided exhibit's. No one had thought up paywalls yet.
It was glorious!!!

[UltraBudgie]

Isn't  that great???  That many years ago we thougth 32k RAM was awesome.  Today, we bitch about anything less than 32mb of RAM.  I have (3) laptops, and (2) of them have 32 mb of RAM.  Those were cool back "in the day" but now we have hyper-threading, over-clocking and multiple process "cores" which renders just raw RAM almost obsolete.  Used to be people measured PC chips on processor chip clock speed...now it's a whole different equation.  Raw clock speed means almost nothing now.

How far we've come.

It's amazing. I remember, in the 80s, holding a 360KB floppy disk in my hand and thinking: wow, everything I've written, everything I've typed is here, in the palm of my hand.  Everything computery, that is, and for a young me that was pretty much everything. I was one of those kids. Proto-nerd.

And it wasn't much longer before I learned Moore's Law. That computer power and storage capacity double, quickly. Over and over again. Every few years. It wasn't much longer before I got my first hard drive. 20MB. Hundreds of floppy disks of storage! Wow!

Oh, that was so many years ago. Kilo, mega. Giga! Just a decade later, storage was being measured using words I didn't even know, back then.

Fast-forward to today. This summer, I've been organizing my data archives. I'm a bit of a packrat, data-wise. I've kept most everything. Rebuild computer to read old ESDI drives and DAT tapes. Data-recovered all those old floppies. Digitized CDs.

Just last week, I managed to consolidate it all down to less than 24TB.  That's more than 50 million times as much data as was on that little 360KB, 5.25" floppy disk.

And you know what? It still all fits on a drive I can hold in the palm of my hand!

[FlyingClayDisk]

...

---

It's amazing. I remember, in the 80s, holding a 360KB floppy disk in my hand and thinking: wow, everything I've written, everything I've typed is here, in the palm of my hand.  Everything computery, that is, and for a young me that was pretty much everything. I was one of those kids. Proto-nerd.

And it wasn't much longer before I learned Moore's Law. That computer power and storage capacity double, quickly. Over and over again. Every few years. It wasn't much longer before I got my first hard drive. 20MB. Hundreds of floppy disks of storage! Wow!

Oh, that was so many years ago. Kilo, mega. Giga! Just a decade later, storage was being measured using words I didn't even know, back then.

Fast-forward to today. This summer, I've been organizing my data archives. I'm a bit of a packrat, data-wise. I've kept most everything. Rebuild computer to read old ESDI drives and DAT tapes. Data-recovered all those old floppies. Digitized CDs.

Just last week, I managed to consolidate it all down to less than 24TB.  That's more than 50 million times as much data as was on that little 360KB, 5.25" floppy disk.

And you know what? It still all fits on a drive I can hold in the palm of my hand!

What I find amazing (working in technology myself) is the full-circle business and personal computing has experienced.

• In the 70's most computers were mainframes accessed through a remote 'dumb' terminal.  This mainframe was housed in a centralized massive Data Centers.
  
• In the 80's the 'Personal Computer' (PC) was all the rage.  No more mainframe connection required.
  
• In the 90's PC's became far more powerful than the original mainframes.
  
• In the 2000's, managing and patching PC's in a corporate environment led to applications being hosted on servers in a Data Center, not the desktop.  Vulnerabilities were being exploited regularly (i.e. hacking for profit).  Physical servers were now being located in leased space in Data Centers owned by others (co-location).
  
• In the 2010's applications and desktops became virtualized and were consolidated back into Data Centers.  Classical servers and storage and networking were converged into consolidated high-density environments like V-Sphere.  Now multiple entities were using the same hardware, just leasing pieces of it.
  
• In the 2020's applications are rarely resident on a desktop, and much of people's personal computing is done in "the cloud".  All of this is consolidated into...you guessed it...very "mainframe"-like environments located in massive Data Centers. 
  

Oh sure, they came up with different fancy and cool sounding names for it today, "virtualized computing", "virtual machines (VMs)', and lots of other things, but the reality is...it's not a whole lot different than the "mainframe" environments of the 70's. 

Full circle.

Looking forward - Now we're seeing even smaller individually operated Data Centers go away, and them being consolidated into new super-Data Centers, owned by one party and operated by other parties (remotely).  The very problem the PC was aimed at solving, independence from Big Brother, is now right back to where it started, only worse now, under the control of fewer and fewer autonomous owner-operators.

And, when Artificial Intelligence creeps into this mix today, how are people to stop it?  They no longer own their own servers (they lease compute and storage incrementally from someone who does).

[ArMaP]

The very problem the PC was aimed at solving, independence from Big Brother, is now right back to where it started, only worse now, under the control of fewer and fewer autonomous owner-operators.

That's why I avoid cloud services as much as I can, based on the principle "if it's not under my control I don't really have it".

[CCoburn]

I think for me it would have been around 1989, and I recall buying from IBM. If I remember right, the processor choices were DX2/DX4. It was just a big old flat desktop with a floppy drive. I spared no expense on the monitor; I got this big heavy IBM CRT P17 I think it was, and I carefully attempted placement on this quite thick slab of a computer case while aiming for the stronger areas to avoid crushing it.


I used to hook TV boxes up to that monitor, and I remember the cable guy telling me that the monitor resolution was way better than what my TV had.

I think I was looking at Compuserve and AOL for internet at the time.

[ArMaP]

I think for me it would have been around 1989, and I recall buying from IBM. If I remember right, the processor choices were DX2/DX4.

The first computer I bought, in 1993, had an Intel 486DX, upgradeable to a DX2 (launched in 1992). It ran at 33MHz and, if I'm not mistaken, had 8 MB of memory.

It cost me the equivalent to 1500 Euros.