Technological Advances
 

I’ve grown up with the technological advancements; they still amaze / scare me.


http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_3330.html


This is an IBM 3330 disk setup from the 70s, we called it a pizza oven.

Each of those 8 drawers holds a removable platter assembly.

We would take the platter cover (on top in the pic) and put our lunch under it over the controller, the right most unit.

That’s how much heat it threw off.



Now each drawer holds a 200 MEG yes MEG drive, so that entire unit holds 1.6 gig.

Each drawer unit cost about 80K, note the controller was extra.

Average access time 30 milliseconds, data transfer rate 800k / second.


Now in my laptop

500 GIG drive (400 times the unit shown).

Average access times 4 to 6 milliseconds (6 times faster)

Data Transfer 3MEG/second or almost 4 times faster.

About 104 bucks at Tiger (I’m not gonna do the math), controller included.

Lets consider the electrical usage difference, the drive in may laptop probably uses 5 watts, 10 maybe tops. This thing threw off enough from one cabinets it kept our lunches warm.

OH and each of those removable platter assemblies weighed in at 11 pounds as I recall.

And they were considered extremely technology advanced for their time.



http://www.staff.ncl.ac.uk/roger.broughton/museum/DASD/200429.htm

You can look at this to see the platter assembly.

I am continually amazed at the technology we have at our fingertips.
Remember, Apollo went to the moon on not much more than slide rules.

I worked with the IBM 3380 units which came a little later. The cabinets were the size of a full-size fridge, and when a disk crashed it was pretty bad. Two IBM engineers had to come on site to replace the disk assemblies because they were so heavy, and it took hours to do.
http://www.computerhistory.org/timel...3380_large.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...Module.agr.jpg

It's interesting that the average car has more computing power than was used in the first moon mission.
What's even wilder is that the severely outdated computer I am running right now has more computing power and storage than existed in the world at the time of the IBM 3330.

Just think what college kids now miss.... writing programs on punch cards, and running the campus main frame on a "time available" basis.
I know someone who screwed up his supposed to be fraction of a second program, and forced the main frame to grind away for hours before it could be stopped. Messed up everyone's schedule.

Well back when I was in high school we still had a card catalogue (which you had to use!) in the library. I also shoot 35mm film on my Canon AE-1, and listen to music on big slabs of grooved spinning vinyl. Technology can be nice, but it's killing off a lot of the creativity in society.

Hopefully my next laptop drive will be solidstate, not a harddrive. Just waiting for them to get a little bigger and cheaper. It will be nice to see the end of spinning drives.

Data transfer from the hard drive in your laptop would be on the order of around 55-75 MB per second. Not 3. 3 is the average speed of a broadband internet connection. And most laptop hard drives average power use is about .5 watt idle, 1.5 watt under heavy use. Many new desktop drives (even the 2 Terabyte ones) only use about 6 watts. Computers have become VERY efficient. I just built a server recently that has 2 Gigs of ram, two 1-terabyte hard drives, a fast CPU, several fans, etc...and at idle it uses 44 watts! The one it replaced used about 145!

My current Asus 1000 netbook has 40GB solid state for $350, with an external 1TB USB drive for $200. That amount of storage would not even be possible on the old IBMs, considering not only the cost but the number of disk addresses and controllers would far exceed what the operating systems were capable of managing. Remember storage was so expensive they stored the year as 2 digits instead of 4!

You are correct, I was confusing mBs and mbs.
thanks for the power numbers, when it got to the point that the new HDs were using less running than the old ones at idle I quit looking.


Yes, I was one of those programmers and DBAs that specified 2 digit years.
At one place we even recompiled all programs, eliminating one buffer per file, the compiled program included that space and the library was pushing it's limits.

How about a mainframe with 1/2 MEG Real ram, I convinced them to up it to 1 meg.

Then while at a company, well about 20 years ago, our software was one region on the first commerical mainframe to have 1 GIG of real memory.
Now we carry gigs like they are nothing.

I am not a big fan of SSDs, price/performance is a long way off. $/byte is rediculus.
Most reports show their general performance better than HDs, but not nearly significant enough to justify their added price. Then you have the wear issue, each bit has a limited Write count and the wear algorithm which seems to slow down the SSD with age and I don't see them.
Now if you worry about dropping it, or battery life those are reasonable justifications. Performance or capacity is a long long way off.

Although with the pace of advancements, and that pace accelerating it could come a lot quicker than anyone can imagine.

Any one have any extra quills for my pen ???


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Take the watches that the NASA engineers now wear, and within them, you'll surely find more computer power than was available during the first moon mission. On the entire planet.

Remember removable media back in the day? :D

http://www.20x200.com/art/images/ric...orkimage_1.jpg

Fun part was looking in the back of the cabinet of one of those big vacuum column tape drives. Big empty box. IBM liked to make big boxes so the bean counters though they were getting something.
First system at my current employer had an 8 mb DRUM memory instead of a hard drive. 'Bout the size of a kegorater.

NOW you're putting it in perspective:D:D