The sixth stage of grief is retro-computing (from medium.com)

[sgifanatic]

https://medium.com/message/networks-without-networks-7644933a3100

Very powerful. Quite depressing. You'll need to set aside some time to read it, but it will be time well spent.

 

[paul]

Nicely written. I've always thought it would be amusing if you could tell people in 1990 that one day the Mac will run a unix OS on intel hardware.

 

[Phil Saunders]

Very well written - certainly made me think about the 'good old days'!

I'd love to go back to 1985 or so and show someone my 64GB microSD card (which lives in my phone) and compare it to their shiny new 64K memory board from a minicomputer of the time

A cool one MILLION times as much memory in a single-user device that fits in my pocket, against a quarter-ton machine that had to support maybe 50 concurrent users ......

The amazing thing is that the people who used the minicomputer back then for the most part did exactly the same kind of jobs that the users of the incredibly powerful office PC's of today do.

Progress? I guess that depends how you look at it :D

 

[MikeS]

...I'd love to go back to 1985 or so and show someone my 64GB microSD card (which lives in my phone) and compare it to their shiny new 64K memory board from a minicomputer of the time

Apples and oranges; SD cards are usually storage, not working memory. More appropriate to compare a 256GB microSD card to a 5MB fridge-sized 14" disk drive from a few years earlier.

I'm still blown away by 256GB of storage on one of those tiny cards...

 

[sgifanatic]

Nicely written. I've always thought it would be amusing if you could tell people in 1990 that one day the Mac will run a unix OS on intel hardware.

In 1990, people were running a Unix OS, but not on Intel hardware Remember A/UX?

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=A/UX

And the Computer Chronicles intro to A/UX:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nId-Nsj5OX4

 

[g4ugm]

I thought "soulfull" rather than sad...

 

[paul]

In 1990, people were running a Unix OS, but not on Intel hardware Remember A/UX?

I'm thinking not so much from a technological view but more from the perspective of what hardened Macophiles of the time would not accept.

 

[Phil Saunders]

Apples and oranges; SD cards are usually storage, not working memory. More appropriate to compare a 256GB microSD card to a 5MB fridge-sized 14" disk drive from a few years earlier.

I'm still blown away by 256GB of storage on one of those tiny cards...

True - I was thinking simply of the fact that electronic memory has physically shrunk by a factor of thousands, and gone up in capacity by a factor of millions - rrgardless of the use to which it is put. I should perhaps of used DIMMS as the example? :D

In 1990, people were running a Unix OS, but not on Intel hardware Remember A/UX?

http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=A/UX

And the Computer Chronicles intro to A/UX:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nId-Nsj5OX4

I was working with proprietary OS's at the time. Remember when anything 'non-standard' even got a look in? Of course, back then there wasn't really a 'standard' - even Unix had so many 'flavors' that moving applications between versions required a full 'port'.

I'm thinking not so much from a technological view but more from the perspective of what hardened Macophiles of the time would not accept.

Back then I never even knew Macs existed!