Then and now. Computers. (1 Viewer)

[Gromett]

58 years separates these two pictures taken at the same place. The 2nd one is far more powerful and has more storage and more memory.

 

[Next Stop]

What gets me is that there is more computing power in my pocket than what it took to put man on the moon!

 

[Just smiffy]

What gets me is that there is more computing power in my pocket than what it took to put man on the moon!

Ah…. But did it…

 

[Arnside037]

My boss told to hire an estate car to collect a computer thirty miles away. Turned out it was all in a box the size of a packet of cornflakes. I could have gone by bus and saved a lot of money. It was a Sinclair ZX80 !

 

[Winger]

And the world is so much a better place…,,

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[LithiumConvert]

58 years separates these two pictures taken at the same place. The 2nd one is far more powerful and has more storage and more memory.

Not strictly accurate.
Neither has any storage. Both require external physical storage.

 

[Gromett]

Not strictly accurate.
Neither has any storage. Both require external physical storage.

You are correct, I missed the word capacity from storage.
The computer in the top image was able to store 300,000 bytes per storage film.

The Computer That Came By Truck

It didn't have the sleek lines that Steve Jobs would admire and it needed to be carried on a truck, but the computer age had finally arrived in rural England.

www.onthisday.com

The raspberry pi Zero supports both USB and SD card storage. The smallest SD card you can reliably buy today is 32GB although you can occasionally see 16GB. Raspberry pi Zero supports 256GB SD cards possibly 512GB but I wasn't able to confirm that they would work without partitioning.

The crazy thing is the 32GB sd card will cost you as much as the computer itself. The zero costs £5.00 the SD card usually around £4.99 or less

 

[dunnah01]

Yeah but what have computers ever done for us...

 

[JJ]

Does size matter?

JJ

 

[nicholsong]

58 years separates these two pictures taken at the same place. The 2nd one is far more powerful and has more storage and more memory.
View attachment 836414

I can relate to that as 58 years ago I was programming an IBM 1401 which was about the size of the first one. Then the air-conditioning unit for the sealed room about the same again.

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[scotjimland]

Does size matter?

JJ

only to the willy wavers ..

 

[Red Sonja]

I can relate to that as 58 years ago I was programming an IBM 1401 which was about the size of the first one. Then the air-conditioning unit for the sealed room about the same again.

My first job was a punch card operator to feed info into these beasts.

 

[ontheroadagain]

Makes you wonder what developments there will be in the next 58 years.
Unfortunately I wont be here to find out.
(But perhaps my AI clone will be)

 

[scotjimland]

Makes you wonder what developments there will be in the next 58 years.
Unfortunately I wont be here to find out.
(But perhaps my AI clone will be)

I would change that to "fortunately " ..

 

[PhilMary]

My first job was a punch card operator to feed info into these beasts.

I was writing programs using punch cards in 1968. Now I feel old.

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[nicholsong]

My first job was a punch card operator to feed info into these beasts.

Interesting. Then there were the 'Verifiers' doing the same job as a cross-check of the cards.

 

[PhilMary]

Interesting. Then there were the 'Verifiers' doing the same job as a cross-check of the cards.

The best bit was after verification you could slip one punch card out of the pile and watch the Sh** hit the fan during compilation. Ah, many happy hours ' till fortran came along then every Tom, Dick and Harry thought they were programmers.

 

[Nirvanauk]

COBOL 68 for me….

 

[scotjimland]

58 years ago I was using a Slide rule ..

 

[Jimbohorlicks]

Does anyone still use Fortran or cobol or is that all obsolete now?

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[dunnah01]

I wonder if the yoof even know (or care) what's inside a computer nowadays

 

[Revolvor]

58 years ago I was using a Slide rule ..

My first job after I finished my apprenticeship was in the Concorde structural design office. I too was preparing data for punch cards for our IBM mainframe, but day-to-day calculations were made using slide-rules. We had one mains operated calculator on its own desk in the office.

My girlfriend bought me a Sinclair Scientific Calculator for £50. It came in kit form, and all the components had to be soldered to a circuit board. Initially, I didn't trust the results, and checked them with my slide rule.

 

[Gromett]

Does anyone still use Fortran or cobol or is that all obsolete now?

Yes, still plenty of jobs around for those two languages. Less competition for them also.

 

[Sue and Rick]

I was writing programs using punch cards in 1968. Now I feel old.

I was born in that year and I feel old.

 

[meanders]

Yes, still plenty of jobs around for those two languages. Less competition for them also.

To be fair it's mainly maintenance stuff rather than writing brand new code although only 3 years ago I had to spec a CICS/DL1 routine in COBOL from scratch for an old application that needed a new online interface.

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[Old Gibber]

My first job was a punch card operator to feed info into these beasts.

SO you are the @@@@@ who used to ensure that every program I tried to run came back with a load of faults due to punch code errors.

 

[Barryh]

A little bit of ICL Plan programming for me in the mid seventies on an ICL 1901A. I was crap at it, and went into operations instead. Many a happy hour spent flirting with the girls in the punch room.

 

[dna]

1982 was the year i started with a well known bank learning z/OS structured assembler -on the training courses we had to type our own punched cards - a nightmare for me who hadn't used keyboards before, my university degree had all been hand written. How times have changed!

 

[StillGoing]

Ferranti FM1600B for me with coding in Fixpac (real-time assembler). It had ferrite core memory.

https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/16840/Ferranti-FM1600-B/

 

[Langtoftlad]

I recognise that building.

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