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Computers of today versus those of the past

AdamSee

AdamSee

AdamSee

Associate
Joined
25 Oct 2002
Posts
1,758
Location
Winchester
I remember using a 133mhz machine when I first started messing about with computers. But in today's terms how much faster are the processors in real terms. Is a single modern day processor more powerful than a super computer say 15 years ago?
 
When I first started using Personal Computers (i.e. IBM PCs, rather than spectrums, BBC B, amiga) I started with an IBM XT clone.

It cost around £1200 and like most of the clones had a turbo button which enabled it to run twice as fast as the genuine IBM XT.

So instead of running at 4MHz, mine would run at 4MHz or 8MHz.

Why the turbo button I hear you ask. Because some programmes ran twice as fast as they should if you ran at 8MHz.

My machine had a double sided 51/4 floppy disk (360KB) of storage.

It also had the luxary of a hard card. In those days if you wanted a hard disk you had to get a hard disk driver card because it wasn't a standard part of the XT architecture. You had two choices - a driver card and a convential hard disk, or a hard card which combined the two.

My hard card was pretty standard for the day and had a whopping 20MB storage.

One thing I will say though - whilst the power and capacity of this computer was puny compared with todays offerings you could still fit everything you wanted on it.

I had games, compilers, word processor, spreadsheet, database, art programmes etc. and it all fitted on that 20MB hard disk.

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Being of ancient DNA ..I remember the lot. I worked for a computer services company back in 1985. I ran Esso's computer desktops and mainframes for 3 years. I remember converting IBM PCs...not Xt or ATs. They had twin 5 1/4 floppies and a massive 64 k..."K" not mb...of onboard RAM. Thats your lot..

A 128k machine was a dream and they all had 12" green screen CRTs. I converted many of them by removing one of the floppy drives and putting in IBM 10mb hard drives that were massive and you had to "park" the head before shutting down. Hard drive cards abounded but they proved to have a reliability problem.

XTs came with a hrad drive and 256k of memory and the powerhouse was the AT and ATX which had 20 or 40mb hard drives and onboard 512k of memory and colour screens were becoming the latest thing. Then came IBM PS1....all proprietry but the beginning of the modern PC

In 1992 I started my own company building, installing networks and PCs and the advent of 386 onboard processors and then 486 33 mhz processors...all hard wired to the motherboard...became the performers of teh day. I mb of memory was a staggering amount. I also imported hard drives to sell on to PC builder. I imported from Malaysia...80 mb hard drives for £105 each and sold them on to PC companies for £100...I was importing 1000 at a time so £5 was a nice easy profit...until the bubble burst. Jeez you can buy a 1TB drive for half that money now.....

Thing about it all is that when PCs were at their early stage programmers had to write lean and games and programs took up much less space and memory as a result...because they had no choice..thats all changed of course and the improvements in hardware and software are staggering and back in 1985 unthinkable.
 
i remember well when i was working on the first AutoCAD computers back in the early 80's...it was Olivetti and Radio Shack........... Internet was years away... everything was still manual draughting....i was one of the first to use AutoCAD

the difference now is increadible, the world is totally different nowadays, it's moved on so much in the last 15 years.

i'm writing this now... on my original Win 98 computer.. yea' it's been updated but it's still basically the same :D:D

but this pc will go soon, to be replaced with my old gaming rig
 
Ah when I were a lad .....

At university, mostly it was green\white screen monitor Unix and VMS stuff but one of the topics was vector graphics programming.

We had to write this using a vector graphics language (a cross between logo and assembler) and load it into a PDP-11.

We loaded each command\data by

setting the address on 16 toggle switches
setting the data on 8 toggle switches
and pressing a button to load

the program would be 100 or more lines of this.

You then ran and debugged it from the same PDP-11 front panel using the 16 address switches to set break points etc.

And before that at 6th form college, I remember having to write a basic pascal program using an editor which produced a stream of punched paper.

This was sent off to local university (Southampton) as the college didn't have a computer. When they received it, they loaded it into the computer and a week later we got the paper listing back showing the compile errors. Week after week we corrected our errors until at the end we were envited to see our programs run. Because of the nature of Pascal they all run to a degree but most had some form of runtime error.

As I recall, the program enabled you to enter the three sides of a right angled triangle and it would calculate the area:eek:

Cheers,

Nigel
 
Having grown up with everything from a mini-mainframe, a (kit built) UK-101, various models of TRS-80, through to BBC B/Master, Amiga/ST, and my first own PC being a 386SX20 (plus the 387 copro), I still find it astonishing that people (some of them above) who have grown up in the industry, STILL can't differentiate between m/M, b/B and k/K - ok, I'll give you k/K as they are essentially the same :D

Yes this post is a little tongue-in-cheek, but honestly I've been in presentations recently with senior technical bods from major companies, and they can't get that simple thing right.

/runs_before_flamage_starts :cool:
 
Yes this post is a little tongue-in-cheek, but honestly I've been in presentations recently with senior technical bods from major companies, and they can't get that simple thing right.
Click to expand...

I guess that goes to show, that to be a senior technical bod with a major company, you don't need to get that simple thing right? ;)
 
When i was messing around with MAME the other day, noticed that the Ridge Racer arcade machine, which used a state of the art DSP CPU, which could process 0.4Gflops and cost £15,000 in 1993...

My Phenom II 550 x 4 can do almost 40Gflops....:eek: according to Intel Burn Test and cost just £80

When you take into account x64bit OS and Memory bandwidth improvements....it must be getting on for 150 times as powerful....:eek:
 
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i had a zx spectrum. FEEL THE POWEER!! also had a amstrad cpc6128. remember reading somewhere that a mobile phone of today is way more power then the apollo spacecraft that went to the moon crazy if you think about it :D
 
oh yes, i started on a 16k spectrum playing 'ant attack' and moved onto a top sec 128k+3 model with built in disk drive!!!!

then i persuaded my dad to buy a newly release pentium, £2500 for a P100 8mb ram, 1mb cirrus logic gfx, and 1.2gb conner hdd, oh and a single speed cd drive.!!

welcome to the packard bell navigator! who remembers that? :)
 
My first computer was the good old commodore 64, I wonder if anyone knows the transfer rate of the good old data cassett?, all i know is when the tape stopped and screen border was still flashing, you had lost a chunk of your life! :D
 
I had an Atarti 400 16k at 7 years old, then when I was 8 got the BASIC ROM so I could program it. The person that designed the Atarti 400 also designed the Amiga. Atari 400 was very advanced but very expensive for time, hense Commodore Vic 20 was more popular. A couple of years after this period the Commodore 64 / Spectrum / BBC Micro wars broke out, but the Atari got there first.

My first PC was a 80286 with 20MB HDD, Hercules (Mono) 12" screen 1MB of ram (Cost £999!), got a lot of use for college work, was a tropper that one.
 
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Shame though, some of today's phone's are so much better than what used to be top of the range... it's not right. I think we've got the wrong idea with nettops. They should run the same standard of software that the ZX and BBC B etc did.
 
My first computer (Commodore plus/4) booted in 1-2 second, it has 1.76 MHz CPU though.
Later I've had some Amigas which booted in 17-20 seconds, when HDD was in.
And then I had to have PCs which booted in 25-30 seconds each, no matter which CPU was inside, how much memory was in there and how fast HDD was :)
Does it satisfy you ? ;-)
Of course, it's a joke. Supercomputers means "clusters" or something similar. So even such structure aged 15 years or some (Cray T3D, 300GFlops) could be comparable to today's - let's say - computers (microcomputers stricte) which speed up to 69 GFlops (Core i7-965) equipped with GF-8800 GT (336 GFlops) ;-) So you see - it depends on point of view.
 
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