The power of the internet never ceases to amaze me. I’ve been checking out a web site that is astonishing in so much as it is garnering all the computational knowledge in the world and doing a damn good job about it.
When you go to the site, click on the “More” link below the search box and run the Video Intro first, and after that, don’t tell me you’re not impressed. Click HERE.
I went and bought a new hard drive for my computer today but I’m somewhat disappointed with it.
Yep, that’s a hard drive at the Computer History Museum in California. One that weighs 27Kgs and has a whopping 5Mb of storage capacity. As a comparison, that small black box you see just at the top right of my keyboard is an external hard drive and has a 320,000 times larger capacity and weighs just a few grams.
This curvaceous device is a Cray-1 supercomputer built in 1972. It was the fastest machine in the world until 1977 and an icon for decades. It cost a mere $6 million and could perform at 160MFLOPS which my mobile phone can now comfortably manage.
Pinned on the board behind my computer desk is this advertisement for a computer that I dreamed of back in the mid 90’s. It was my ultimate drool want to have machine but I wasn’t in the “richest man in the cemetery” stage of my life then so had to settle for a mediocre $4000 one instead.
As a comparison again, some then and now figures. RAM – 32Mb to 6000Mb, Hard drives – 2 x 1.6Gb to 5 x 320Gb, Video Card – 4Mb to 2000Mb blah, blah.
Who did I send to sleep with that lot?
© 2010 Dogbait's Babble · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
