Technology..

[MontyVeda]

36 Years ago I started work with Sperry Univac as a computer engineer. There was no concept of GB of data.

...

The first time I'd heard the phrase Giga-something was in 1985: Back to the Future.... 1.21 gigawatts, with a soft G.

These days I'm constantly being berated for saying Gigabytes with a soft G... but Doc Brown set the precedent as far back as 1955. It is a soft G... I'm right, everyone else is wrong

 

[winjim]

The first time I'd heard the phrase Giga-something was in 1985: Back to the Future.... 1.21 gigawatts, with a soft G.

These days I'm constantly being berated for saying Gigabytes with a soft G... but Doc Brown set the precedent as far back as 1955. It is a soft G... I'm right, everyone else is wrong

It's all Greek to me.

 

[newfhouse]

There would normally be another orange cabinet on the RHS that held a disk drive with a fixed platter (about 15 inches in diameter) and a removable one of 10MB each.

My first ‘proper’ job 39 years ago was working shifts operating something similar for a department store, an NCR mainframe quite like this:

For younger readers, the cabinet on the right that looks like a top loading washing machine held the swappable - and heavy - hard disk pack. Much of our data was held on magnetic tape. Branch data came to us overnight over dedicated phone lines at 75 baud and was recorded to cassette tape before being imported to the main system.

 

[DCBassman]

And the perfectly ordinary 40 megabit fibre connection I currently use at home would have been a dream even for the NSA back then.

 

[MichaelW2]

I have used so many obscure and obsolete types of computer storage media over the years. Archiving data requires archiving the media, a reader for the media, a driver for the reader, an operating system for the driver and some computer hardware fir the OS.
I can recall 12" optical discs in the 1980s that were the future of storage.
https://obsoletemedia.org/lv-rom/
I also remember Not the Nine oClock news spoof of Tomorrow's World where a microchip was shown in comparison to a thumb for scale,but the thumb was huge.

 

[ColinJ]

Bluetooth?

Nope - a simple USB driver!

The phone is an old HTC One M8 and HTC don't seem to be doing much to support it. I found an old copy of HTC Sync Manager, which installs drivers, but they seem iffy on Win 10. I have had the USB connection work a few times but usually it keeps disconnecting before I can do anything.

I have seen a few dodgy-looking websites which say that they have suitable drivers but I am not willing to risk installing software which could in reality be something sinister!

 

[Old jon]

Hmm, @ColinJ not been really following this, but. Microsoft do a 'Your Phone' app for W10 and a phone app not surprisingly called 'Your Phone Companion'. Works on my Samsung phone and desktop.

 

[keithmac]

The first time I'd heard the phrase Giga-something was in 1985: Back to the Future.... 1.21 gigawatts, with a soft G.

These days I'm constantly being berated for saying Gigabytes with a soft G... but Doc Brown set the precedent as far back as 1955. It is a soft G... I'm right, everyone else is wrong

I have a WD NAS drive for our music etc, 3 Terrabytes and that was only £100 ish 3 years ago. Amazing how it advances.

I fancied a 1tb usb stick but still too £££..

 

[Dave7]

MODS......can you not get people to speak/type in English on here. I understand maybe 5% of it

 

[DCBassman]

MODS......can you not get people to speak/type in English on here. I understand maybe 5% of it

We like our geek-speek, thank you very much!

 

[Globalti]

My first job was in a windowless office in Covent Garden helping to iron out the glitches in the National Travel Survey. Every journey was recorded on a punch card so we had to squint at the holes to work out the glitches and send the cards back for correction. I had a raging headache for the first three days, which I think came from the fluorescent lights. But we had fun inventing trips to put right the errors.

 

[DCBassman]

You can now get 18TB hard drives. Blimey.

 

[MontyVeda]

I have a WD NAS drive for our music etc, 3 Terrabytes and that was only £100 ish 3 years ago. Amazing how it advances.

I fancied a 1tb usb stick but still too £££..

Don't you mean Tiggabytes?

After being berated so many times for saying gigabyte with a soft G, I felt it necessary to wind up those pedants by completely miss-pronouncing the terabyte

Does the cost of storage fluctuate like the cost of RAM used to do? I bought my 5TB HD four years ago for £80... these days i can't find one anywhere near that price. Even a 2nd hand one the same as mine has an asking price of £100 on Ebay!

edited so i don't look as daft as Keith

 

[DCBassman]

<pedant> terra = planet earth, tera = trillion </pedant>
So, terabyte.
I'm enjoying this nerdiness!

 

[slowmotion]

<pedant> terra = planet earth, tera = trillion </pedant>
So, terabyte.
I'm enjoying this nerdiness!

Yeah! You tell 'em @DCBassman!