A Little "Bit" of Computer History

Time to take a "byte" out of the history of computers. I know that was a bad pun, it this video shows the advancement in computer technology. A few trainzers on the forums come to mind when watching this video. Can you imagine running T:ANE on a computer built in the 1980's? You might also notice a couple of famous movie stars in the background.

Me likey. This is a cool video.

That was cool! So much has changed yet so much has stayed the same in so many ways.

I started my foray into the computer industry when that removable platter came out. My initial job was a PCB assembler building video terminal motherboards and power supplies. I moved up in the company I was at and eventually became a hardware tech that used to repair Phoenix and Hawk controller boards for removable hard drive platters, as well as controller boards for the Ontel line of terminals. In addition to the controller cards, I also used to calibrate the hard drives. These drives though were a bit bigger at 1.2 to 1.8 GB, and looked like a stack of plates in a plastic container. The repair was a pain in the backside too because it required special tools and jig and an oscilloscope to "set" the heads in the proper location in the drive. Once a specific pattern appeared on the scope screen, the drive was calibrated.

The big 8-inch floppy drives were very similar. The old Shugart drives had to be calibrated in the same fashion. They hand an inherent calibration problem due to the floppy spindle being belt-driven. Eventually the belt would stretch, and throw everything out of whack. The problem though is once a drive was calibrated any data written while it was going out of calibration was inaccessible due to the misaligned heads. Fast forward about 10 years to the early 1990s and we then had SyQuest removable cartridges. These were a great way to share media when the drives didn't lose calibration. The issue with these was the removable cartridges had aluminum platters that would expand or contract a little bit depending upon the temperature. They would work fine one day, but not the next and they couldn't very well be shared the way they were meant to be.

Then we have today with devices that are 16-300 times or more in parts that either barely move, or don't even move at all.

Anyway sorry for going on a tangent !

John

Thanks for sharing that, I really enjoyed it.

This is a short video I watched a while back about the evolution of RAM. It's astounding how both the price and size has come down. Remembering my first two computers in the '80's, a Commodore VIC 20 and a Commodore 64...and also remembering how much storage the large floppy disks had. It seemed that every advancement that was made, we were always told we would never need more. I was super excited when I built my first computer and purchased a hard drive with 8GB capacity. It was massive at the time and I never dreamed that I would fill it. Now an operating system alone is about 4GB, a DVD holds more than 4GB, and never mind a Blu-Ray.

Now with solid state drives the capacity vs price is at war again while the size is quite small. Price is always a consideration with my budget so I have a small 120GB solid state drive and opted for a 2TB mechanical hard drive. This is my first SSD and I'm amazed at the speed. My computer boots up completely in 8 seconds.

The video is interesting, especially when he talks about the cost of purchasing a modern amount of RAM at early '80's prices.

https://youtu.be/rK-Tg_RJ69s

I started in 1962, assigned to computer programming school for the Navy. We worked on Burroughs D823's with four IBM tape drives and 4 huge boxes (7ft x 3ft x 4ft) that held 4096 words of 48-bits each. We worked from terminals and input our programs on punch cards carried around in trays.

When computer kits came out (4040 [4-bit] and 8080 [8-bit]), I built one. It had a massive total of 128 BYTYES of RAM and input was toggle switches and output was actual incandescent bulbs as LED's came later. You had to fingerbone in machine code, hit Advance, and do the next byte of instruction.

Then Heathkit came out with their own H-8 computer and I went nutz, interfacing it with my whole house through home-built interfaces like my ham RTTY and a remote terminal.

I still do stuff like that now, over 50 years later. I create web sites, build and program computers and repair ones given to me by friends.

Bill

And now a 'Bit' of an Update

In my Commodore days I bought a 1 Gb hard drive for $999.95. Today you can get a 4 Tb hard drive for around $250 or less.

Ain't progress grand?:hehe:

Ben

bendorsey said:

In my Commodore days I bought a 1 Gb hard drive for $999.95. Today you can get a 4 Tb hard drive for around $250 or less.

Ain't progress grand?:hehe:

Ben

Click to expand...

Under half that price:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822178338

...and the development labs are now working with prototype storage technology based on 1 bit =1 individual atom. That means that the entire US library of Congress could be stored in a speck of dust. This is NOT quantum computing but standard 8 bits = 1 byte storage.

The binary 1s and 0s are set by moving individual atoms into "holes" in the substrate material with a scanning electron microscope probe. They are read by moving the probe over the surface to detect the presence (or absence) of an atom in each hole position.

There are just a few "minor" drawbacks to this technology at the moment - for example it can take up to 1 minute to read a byte of data and several minutes to write one, and excess heat will cause the atoms to clump together destroying the data. But these are early days.

pware said:

...and the development labs are now working with prototype storage technology based on 1 bit =1 individual atom. That means that the entire US library of Congress could be stored in a speck of dust. This is NOT quantum computing but standard 8 bits = 1 byte storage...

Click to expand...

I worked for IBM General Technologies Division in the early 80's (before moving into Federal Systems), and remember well the department meeting where an expert was proclaiming that we had reached the two-micron limit for gate sizes. Physics would not permit us to reach much smaller sizes, he claimed. Considerable investment was required to push to the 1.5-micron level, and a big race with the Japanese was underway to beat them to the punch, so to speak.

Today, transistor gate size has reached a very small 25 nanometers. They actually are able to create gates using optical lithography techniques where the actual gate sizes are under half the wavelength of light used to create the masks! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/65_nanometer

Sounds like an extension of how a transistor works - electrons going to holes. But there they go in a crudely modulated stream.

My first job was fixing these things (Univac-I). Hardly useful for Trainz since the "display" was an electric Model-28 teletype. Note that the "scope" was always ready. The vacuum tubes were operated at saturation when on, to insure a nice clean square wave that the gate tubes could use without ambiguity. At night, the lights were turned out and we looked for tubes with a blue glow which indicated gas. Yanked them out with large tweezers (very hot) and tossed them into a big barrel. The mag tapes were steel and the operators developed muscles mounting/dismounting them. The model 807 tube buss driver had 800v on them and the power supply offered that at many amps of current - a quick death.

pware said:

That means that the entire US library of Congress could be stored in a speck of dust.

Click to expand...

I'd hate to handle such a storage device. My flash drives go missing often enough as it is! :hehe:

I'd be afraid to use my can of duster for fear of blowing out my data storage.

BIll