As a long time computer nerd, I am amazed.

[GH85Carrera]

I bought my first computer in the very early 1980s and paid something like $600 for my manual dial 300 baud modem. I got on the BBS systems and download lots of files. Painful slow at those speeds, but the files were tiny.

Modem speeds got faster and modems got lots cheaper. I remember chatting with the Engineer of the year for all of AT&T and how we were now getting the blazing speeds of "only" 12 minutes to download an entire megabyte! That was fast.

I miss dial up as much as I juvenile acne and high school. My broadband has increased and I now have a "Gigabyte" connection, but like almost all computer descriptions, that is a outright lie. I have never been above 936 bits per second, and that is just theory, and not realty, but still dang fast.



I have a small business and we have Microsoft One Drive as part of Office 365. I send huge files up and down regularly. I just download a file from my business partner on our shared one drive.

It came down at 4.5 MB per second real world no theory. At the dial up speeds I once thought was really good it would have taken 4,116 minutes, or 2.8 DAYS.

It just boggles my mind that is just the speed of things.

I recently finished up this aerial image.



My computer with 256 Gig of RAM never blinked. I uploaded to the customer, and they loved it.

Now Amazon is selling some really fast insane internet access FTP service but I am happy with my current speeds.

I guess it is much like I imagine my grandfather would look at our 65 inch HD TV with surround sound. He was born 20 years before the birth of radio. TV was almost magic, and color TV and low def, and bad colors was just amazing.

[KFC911]

I waa a computer/networking IT geek. Gig speeds, etc. are aggegrate theoritical maxes for the "pipe" .... and total BS.

Back in the day when GIGE appeared, I put the fastest TCP stacks and NICs on the planet in a "loop-back" throughput test ...

I'll respect you in the morning too

But it's mighty-fast....

I was in communications r&d at IBM before fiber fresh outta college....

Geeks-R-Us Glen

[stevej37]

My first computer was a Radio Shack the second one was a Radio Shack Color Computer.

My Grandmother once told me that one day her and all the neighbors stood out by the road to see the first ever car come down the road. (nothing but horses before that time)

[javadog]

Life with a Verizon iPhone in a big city:

[GH85Carrera]

At my office back then, our building was just a few hundred feet from a SW Bell switch building. We were the first ISDN customer installation for internet use. I had multiple managers and supervisors and one technician in my office, and all of them were on the phone to other people all over the country. One of them finally said that's it! and it started working. I watched the speed indicator screaming fast, and then they dialed it down to what we were allowed and paying for.

[Rusty Heap]

First pc was 10 mhz, V20 processor I think, whopping 4 color ega graphics. You could boot it with two 360K 5 1/4" floppies with 3 files. Autoexec.bat, config.sys, and ? trivia questions for the brain trust. Same processor as the NEC 8088. hoo boy howdy, a 16 bit system at the time was rockin' the house.

[GH85Carrera]

My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 with a cassette tape drive for storage. When the super powerful Commodore C-64 came out, I got one with the modem as an add on.

I went to a club meeting to try to learn something more about the C-64. I met a guy there that we exchanged phone numbers. He called me a hour after the meeting and he read to me a few lines of code to type in, and I hit enter. It was a super low end modem program. That allowed him to send me a program that I saved to my single sided 5.25 inch floppy drive. That was a full modem program. The world of the BBS was open. And this was when AT&T owned all the equipment. It was illegal to own your own phone, or to plug in a modem. I did it anyway as I was a rebel without a clue.



My bought a pair of jeans on Compuserve. Then I got my first bill from Compuserve for the connect time and almost fainted. They charge by the minute, and at 300 baud it was just too expensive.

My first IBM platform PC was a 4.77 Mhz CPU. and DOS 2.1 two 360K floppies, and 256K of RAM. I quickly maxed out the memory to 640K and then added a 10 MB hard drive.

When I upgraded that it was to a 386 CPU and 2 MB of RAM! I still have my copy of Windows 386 which is basically Window 1.




This is my first mouse that I got with Windows 386. It is patent pending and has a steel roller ball.

[KFC911]

My first computer was an IBM S/370 located in Research Triangle Park, and a Burroughs 6800 and a Vax/PDP 11 in the university computer room .... 1978. It wasn't until 17 years later that I bought a "toy PC" ..... The big blue boxes ran about $10 million each back then..... and being a total systems geek, I had keys and total access too....

.....and normal people left me alone

[GH85Carrera]

My boss at the photo lab where I worked wanted a computer system to record every sale, and track the profit and loss. We were using a cash register, and it was only doing part of the job.

He went to the local IBM sales place, and ended up getting talked into a IBM PC. in 81 or 82. It was $5,000 and had two floppies and a small hard drive. We set it up folowing the instructions and saw

A>

Now what? There was no software at all anywhere. We were going to have to become programmers. He boxed it up, and took it back and explained what he wanted. They sent him back with a IBM System 36 and it had an actual accounting program, that was pretty fundamental. He found a local programmer to modify the code to fit our needs.

Later when the IBM AT was released he got one of those with the 32 MB hard drive and 2 MB of RAM. He bought Lotus 123 version 1. He could finally massage the data like he wanted that the System 36 generated. He became a pretty good wiz at Lotus 123.

[rfuerst911sc]

My first was an Etch-a-Sketch 😜

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by rfuerst911sc

My first was an Etch-a-Sketch 😜

That is pure analog!

[zakthor]

Storage too.

I namember buying a 1gb hard disk for a grand.
Four months ago i bought a 256gb micro sd card for $20… hold all my cycling training videos in a little plastic chip thats smaller than my fingernail,

From 1mb per $ to 12800 per $.

[GH85Carrera]

Oklahoma City was the home of multiple companies building hard drives. MPI through several mergers and acquisitions became Seagate.

I was still working with a 32 MB hard drive in a PC At at work, and a 10 MB at home when Seagate came rolling in the front door with a box the size of a old washing machine, a huge box of floppies and one of the first 3.5 inch 1 GB hard drive. We shot photos of the huge stack of floppies to make a GB, the huge 1 GB box that had something like 20 inch platters, and the all new 1 GB 3.5 inch hard drive. I remember thinking I could never possibly fill up a 1 GB hard drive, and how many floppies it would take to back it up.

Right now my computer, that I type this on had two M/2 drives that are 2 TB each, and a RAID 5 drive that is 14 TB. I need to go delete some old projects on the RAID to clear off space as I only have 2 TB free right now.

[herr_oberst]

Printing and publishing was where storage took Moores law and ran with it. Tape drives became removable cartridge systems from Bernoulli and SyQuest which then begat the ubiquitous Zip drives and later the problematic Jaz drives, and ultimately fast internet rendered all of it obsolete, and everyone just sends data through packets. To India and other places where labor is cheaper.

Technology!

[masraum]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

I miss dial up as much as I juvenile acne and high school. My broadband has increased and I now have a "Gigabyte" connection, but like almost all computer descriptions, that is a outright lie. I have never been above 936 bits per second, and that is just theory, and not realty, but still dang fast.

Tiny point, you don't have a gigabyte connection, you have a gigabit connection.

Memory is normally measured in bytes (each byte is 8 bits).

bandwidth/link speed is measured in bits per second (bits, kilobits, megabits, gigabits, etc....

At work, all of the servers are currently running 10Gigbit connections, and our infrastructure is mostly 4x10G. But we are getting ready to upgrade our infrastructure connections to 100gigabit, and the servers are going to start upgrading to 25gigabit connections.

Our company has many connections to AWS that are 100gb, but they are planning upgrades to 4x100gb.

And some other nerd details.

Usually b=bits and B=bytes.

So your Internet (supposed to be capitalized) connection is 1gb, and your computer has 256 gB of RAM.

[masraum]

When I was a kid, we got a Commodore 64. It was brand new. You couldn't even get a floppy drive for it yet, so we got the cassette deck. As soon as the floppy drive was available, we got one. I tried programming in basic when we got it. I just didn't have the patience to type for days for a colored circle to "bounce" across the screen. I learned a little bit of stuff on it, but it was mostly a game machine.

THen in college, I got a Tandy 1000TX which was a 286SX with 640k RAM and 16 color 320x200 graphics (Tandy had a midline between CGA and EGA, with CGA res, but EGA color). I never did get the 384k RAM upgrade for it. For Christmas, my parents upgraded it with a 32MB "hard card" (drive and drive controller on one card). I think I ended up upgrading the graphics with a VGA card w/1MB RAM. And then I bought the chips (yes, individual chips) and upgraded the RAM on the card to 2MB.

I realized that I was "into computers" but not into programming/coding. Now I do a little coding/scripting, but only the most basic stuff, and not much of it.

[john70t]

Branch Education has some excellent videos explaining how computers and tech work.
(I wish they made these 40 years ago..)
https://www.youtube.com/@BranchEducation

[KFC911]

^^^^ The whole time I was getting a degree in Computer Science, I knew damn well I wasn't gonna program as a career ..... and I was excellent at it too. But I did write some code over the years .... various languages ... just another tool in my toolbox. I discovered my niche when I joined the microcode testing group with IBM's Advanced Communications Division at RTP .... hey .... this geeky crap is sorta cool .

And real programmers code in Assembler .... well.... at least they used to

signed....

T-Rex

[Crowbob]

My first computer was a Texas Instruments SR-50A calculator.

[RobFrost]

It may be different in USA but here in UK speeds are always quoted in gigaBIT not gigaBYTE units, which often leads people to get confused that their service is only delivering one eighth of the speed they expected.

The amazing thing about the Internet is that we each carry around in our pockets, access to the entire realm of human knowledge, updated real time.

I used to think the humble land telephone was amazing - it still is. You can take any phone anywhere in the world, and make any other one, wherever it is, ring out, and then speak to the person on the other end.

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