Tech Wednesday

A few computer related thoughts, both old and new, that have come to my attention lately. The new has to do with this bad boy:

 

File it under "Memory Loss" - something that I'm becoming familiar with these days. Powered up the desktop and all it did was beep at me. Annoyingly. Consistently. Tried the usual; power off, power on; unplug the cable, plug it back. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Called the computer dude who makes service calls, and when he showed up the next day, I turned the system on and it booted perfectly!

I'm standing there thinking bad words, and he said, "I'm that good!" But in the long run he did make it go Beep! and now all is well with that system. Now if I could just get my iPad to quit closing apps immediately after opening them.

Both old and new. I was at the tire place this past week, and the technician printed out my service ticket - on a dot matrix printer.

The noisy little printers had not crossed my mind in a long time, but I discovered that not only are they still in use, they are still being produced, and they are not cheap!

The really old has to do with these pictures I came across. This one is of the first IBM Disk Storage Unit - the model 350 - being loaded on an aircraft. Both the drive and the Airline are long obsolete. This particular unit provided the equivalent of a whopping 3.75MB of disk space! That would hold fewer than 100 average iPhone pictures.

The 2nd photo is an ad for early disk drives for the initial IBM Personal Computers. The capacity has been boosted up to an incredible 10MB, but look at the price! Still, the 10MB version costs only a single month's lease payment of the 350 Storage Unit above.

By contrast, I picked up a small (3x4x1/2 inch) 1 Terra-byte drive - roughly a million megabytes - a while back for about $50. No doubt they are cheaper now.

Oh, the memory stick above? It's 2 Gigabytes (2,000 Megabytes)  and set me back $12. Installed.