How much has technology come on.....

[Jay McLaughlin]

I've just been having a clear out and just binned an old Zip Drive and a load of Zip Disks. I remember paying £16 each for them when I got them and they only hold 100MB each!

It's crazy to think that people give away 1GB USB sticks for free nowadays!

Give it a couple of years and a terabyte will be small and usb will be old skool!

[Kenneth Green]

I know what you mean Jay I just got rid of a 50MB hard disk that at some point I was going to install but then forgot about.

[ChrisHill]

I remember paying £250 for a Lexar 1Gb 32x compactflash card.... errr, actually, I bought SIX!! 

[nick76]

I remember paying over £450 for a SCSI 10GB hard drive. Then two years ago it went to the dump - fully functioning!

[David Simm]

Oh boy you guys must be new comers, I paid $999 for a 380 megabyte CF card when I went digital. I remember thinking at the time maybe I should go back to film because I hadn't enough storage capacity to  1/10th of  a wedding.

[Rob T]

I know what you mean Jay I just got rid of a 50MB hard disk that at some point I was going to install but then forgot about.

Luxury.

I used to dream of owning a 50Mb hard drive.

When I were young, I had two 1.4Mb floppy disks, one held the operating system and the other one stored my programs and all my data.

Rob

[Tim Hoy]

Well now that we're obviously here to outdo each other in the "only me" old fart competition.  My first computer had a 30Mb hard drive (it was a top of the range IBM PS2 and I made sure I didn't settle for just the standard 20Mb hard drive).  It cost me just over £2,400.  At the same time I bought WordPerfect 5.1 on 5 x floppy disks at the cut price of £450.00.  I'm still gob smacked that you can get 8Gb of memory on a CF card the size of a big postage stamp. 

My uncle (Edward Hoy - if anyone is vaguely interested) was one of the architects of GPS for the MOD(N) at the time.  The prototype cost £50,000 and was the size of a large living room.  For a computer to hold sufficient memory for a modern day DVD movie in the year I was born (1960) the not-so-personal computer would have had to have been the size of the White House.  But in 1960 teachers, nurses, firefighters and bus drivers could also get rotten drunk, a night in a hostel, a huge bag of fish and chips, 20 Rothmans and a cab home for their day's salary.  Not everything new is indicative of positive progress.  I'm not going to hanker for the "good old days" as much of the past is full of misery, disease and intolerance.  Equally I'm not going to celebrate "modernisation" that is all too often the dodgy politician's term for "cuts".

[Kenneth Green]

OK! Tim you can have the title "only me old fart" I was going to say the first Kodak digital camera I bought for my wife had a 250KB CF card which I still have  .


Ken

[Gareth Williams]

Lol I remember having a winchester hard drive (like a small top loading washing machine) attatched to a BBC micro (converted to run on a Z80 processor) and not forgetting the 5½" floppies, still have an original Apple Mac (use it as a stool), ooh oooh not forgetting the Sinclair ZX80 (the white one you built yourself) and the ZX81 with an add on 16K memory module that plugged in the back

[Jay McLaughlin]

I've actually still got my Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K! Complete with rubber keys!

[Richard P Walton]

I worked in jessops when 128mb cards were like £35.00 and that wasn't that long ago. crazy how things have moved in recent years. 

I think i bought an 8gb sd card for 15 quid delivered on play.com a few months ago

[Gareth Williams]

Mine was originally a 16k, popped a friends 48K open got the chip numbers, got them from Maplin and did an upgrade on mine



eeeww those rubber keys

but hacking the games was good fun

I try and avoid Jessops now - so expensive

[Mark 1]

Mine was originally a 16k

I had the 1k ZX81 and then got the 16k upgrade pack. Not one of yer new-fangled Spectrum thingummies .  I remember Clive Sinclair had a challenge - who could write a program that filled up the whole of the 16k pack. Didn't take very long . Ah the memories of tapes loading old programs and typing things in long hand.

Funnily enough, I had a guy around PAT testing my kit yesterday and we were talking about the old 8" floppy drives really old tech stuff. Who's going to be second to admit to using punch-cards for program entry on main-frames (I'll be first)

(In my day we had an abacus and considered ourselves lucky )

What worries me is not that I had a ZX81 but that this is now 27 years ago. How did that happen then?

[Alan Mooney]

I've actually still got my Sinclair ZX Spectrum 48K! Complete with rubber keys!

I still have mine too Jay, When the 128k+3 came out I was sure we'd be in space ships living on the moon by the year '1999'
Remember paying £420 Irish Pound for a Pentium 133 and £350 for 120mb hard drive.

Just picked up a 1TB for €250 the other day.

Whats next..

[Rob T]

Who's going to be second to admit to using punch-cards for program entry on main-frames (I'll be first)

(In my day we had an abacus and considered ourselves lucky )

You were lucky to have punch-cards for program entry on main-frames!

I used to have to get up at six in the morning, cut down a tree, make my own perforated paper rolls used for controlling textile looms
I then worked twenty-six hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years,

an if we wanted an abacus we used to go down to gravel pit, freezing cold in't middle of winter, drill holes in little bits of stone to make our own,


And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.