[NSRCA-discussion] website back up

[Bill Glaze]

I once went our waterskiing with a friend of a friend in the summer of 1963..  
This guy worked for J.P.L. (Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of Cal Tech) and was tasked with helping "invent" a computer ordered by the U.S. Navy.  He said that they were baffled because the computer was to store "ten megabits of information."  He went on to explain to this dumbhead (me):  "That's TEN MILLION BITS!  Who would ever need to store TEN million bits of information?"
Who indeed?  My first hard drive, ca. 1988, was 20 megabits, and was going obsolete almost by the hour.
Bill Glaze
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Lightfoot 
  To: 'General pattern discussion' 
  Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 9:07 AM
  Subject: Re: [NSRCA-discussion] website back up


  Glad to see that I wasn't the only sucker that bought a DEC Rainbow. I couldn't afford the HD. Can you believe that we paid over $3K for that anchor? Of course that smooth scroll display made it worthwhile! I had a grad school classmate in '82 from IBM who said that the PC would never amount to anything.

   

  Jay Marshall 

  From: nsrca-discussion-bounces at lists.nsrca.org [mailto:nsrca-discussion-bounces at lists.nsrca.org] On Behalf Of Pete Cosky
  Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 8:48 AM
  To: 'General pattern discussion'
  Subject: Re: [NSRCA-discussion] website back up

   

  I loved the Rainbow. CPM OS and dual 5 ¼ floppies in a single unit height..it was THE machine IMHO back then.

   

  From: nsrca-discussion-bounces at lists.nsrca.org [mailto:nsrca-discussion-bounces at lists.nsrca.org] On Behalf Of Phil Spelt
  Sent: Saturday, December 04, 2010 8:38 AM
  To: General pattern discussion
  Subject: Re: [NSRCA-discussion] website back up

   

  In 1983, I bought a 5MB hard drive for my DEC Rainbow for about $500, and wondered how I would EVER fill up the 5 MB!!!  'Course, we can do a LOTmore these days, such as Call Of Duty, etc, etc. lol...

  At 08:22 PM 12/3/2010, you wrote:

  Yep. My 1st hard drive was 10MB, and cost $450. Storage and RAM are crazy cheap these days. Consider that the software used to control the Command Module on the Apollo missions ran in 60K of memory. 2 blocks of ROM (24k and 32k each) and 1 block of RAM (4k). 

  Doug



  ---- Ron Van Putte <vanputte at cox.net> wrote: 
  > A computer guy told me recently that he sold hard drives with one  
  > terrabyte of memory for over $2 million several years ago, after I  
  > told him I had just bought one for $69.99 plus shipping.
  > 
  > Ron VP
  > 
  > On Dec 3, 2010, at 5:27 PM, Bob Richards wrote:
  > 
  > > Core memory, I bet!
  > >
  > > --- On Fri, 12/3/10, Phil Spelt <chuenkan at comcast.net> wrote:
  > >
  > > Speaking of "knowing the whole thing", Ron, in 1972, already, when  
  > > I was a college prof in Indiana, we had a relatively new Digital  
  > > Equipment Corp. (DEC) PDP-11-20 mainframe computer in the comp  
  > > center.  A DEC guy was there service the disk drives, and I asked  
  > > him something about the memory modules.  He didn't know the answer,  
  > > and when I expressed surprise, he indicated that there was no one  
  > > at DEC that knew any of their computers from end to end!!!  And  
  > > that was 1972 --think how complex things have gotten by now...
  > >
  > >
  > > _______________________________________________
  > > NSRCA-discussion mailing list
  > > NSRCA-discussion at lists.nsrca.org
  > > http://lists.nsrca.org/mailman/listinfo/nsrca-discussion
  > 
  > _______________________________________________
  > NSRCA-discussion mailing list
  > NSRCA-discussion at lists.nsrca.org
  > http://lists.nsrca.org/mailman/listinfo/nsrca-discussion

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  --> There are only two types of aircraft -- fighters and targets.

  Phil Spelt, Past President, Knox County Radio Control Society, Inc.
         URL: http://www.kcrctn.com
  AMA--1294,  Scientific Leader Member  SPA--177, Board Member
        My URL: http://mywebpages.comcast.net/~chuenkan/
        (865) 435-1476 v  (865) 604-0541 c 



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