The COMPUTER Thread

[john70t]

(there's lots of threads/posts but not a central one)

[john70t]

CPUs are going 3D. Rare earth metals replaced by silicone glass and common materials.Maybe disbursed with central nodes like human neurons.
The progression chart may go vertical.



3D spinning fan monitors. The moving parts will no longer be required someday.
CAD will become amazing. Entertainment becomes completely immersive and interactive. Walk through your favorite movie and help the protagonist finish the task.
https://holofanco.com/
https://aiholofan.com/product/hdmi-65cm-holographic-fan/



Artificial muscles have already been created.

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley is fast approaching.
"The uncanny valley effect is a hypothesized psychological and aesthetic relation between an object's degree of resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to the object. The uncanny valley hypothesis predicts that an entity appearing almost human will elicit uncanny or eerie feelings in viewers. "

[rattlsnak]

Just put a new motherboard in yesterday and got rid of the big radiator/fan cooler setup and went with ARGB liquid cooler.

[stevej37]

In my first year of college 1972, I took computer 101
They had just built a new building for the computer....it took up most of the second floor.
Our time with the computer was limited to 10 or 15 minutes each and we used punchcards to feed in our equations at desk terminals on the first floor. (which were connected to the main on the 2nd)

[Gogar]

Originally Posted by john70t

(there's lots of threads/posts but not a central one)

wow that might as well be me! Nailed it. Still have the C64 downstairs!

[id10t]

Originally Posted by Gogar

wow that might as well be me! Nailed it. Still have the C64 downstairs!

Same here, on my TRS-80 Mk IV (32k RAM, white case, dual floppies). Even submitted one for publishing to Dragon Magazine (character generator for D&D) but I never heard anything back from them ....

Then later came the dialing into BBSes from my 286 and 386... Then the Internet via local library dialup in late 1993/early 94 on the 386 and 486.

[KFC911]

Originally Posted by stevej37

In my first year of college 1972, I took computer 101
They had just built a new building for the computer....it took up most of the second floor.
Our time with the computer was limited to 10 or 15 minutes each and we used punchcards to feed in our equations at desk terminals on the first floor. (which were connected to the main on the 2nd)

The Abacus 1000 ?

In '78 ... we handed Fortran and 370 Assembler punch card decks in at the Computer Room window ... and picked up the printouts later. CRT showed up around '80...

All flavors

No PCs until much later ... but microcode on a Motorola 6800 microprocessor based comm device that was similar to a Carrera ECU chip in '84 ... but ours had 18 of them and cost 5 times more than a cheap new Porch 911

The Porch is still cooler

[Scott Douglas]

I learned the hard way about removing heat sinks. Never could get all these pins to line up so I could put it back together.

[john70t]

Dad was at the front of the line for new tech.

-He bought one of the first available VCRs ($1k? $2k?) while mom pinched every single penny to an extreme. This was ironic because our family was in the newspaper for not having a tv at all.
A scrap between my sister and I over the corded VCR remote control led to me chasing her into the bathroom, and her slamming and locking the door.
(I was finally big enough to start winning fights)
The thing is all my fingers, last two phalanges, were in the door jam. I screamed and she opened the door. A black line the height of half a pencil was across them. This went away within a few weeks. Later I looked at the door jam and there was no gap. Maybe 1/8" inch at most. This rightfully should have snapped them all backwards or chopped them off. Darwin has been kind or blind.

-Pop bought a Kaypro II for his education work.
Lots of documents.
I think he used a dot matrix printer or spinning ball, but those laser one were pretty neat.
It looked like a portable desktop box where the keyboard was snapped onto one end with a tiny monochrome screen built in. A precursor to the modern laptop.
I was not to touch. I looked at the manuals and all their gibberish and syntax but never got far into understanding code. I was stuck at the cord going in.

[Scott Douglas]

At one point in my life I had a couple of Kaypro's in my possession. When space got too tight they all went to Goodwill.

[stevej37]

I still have the receipt for my first VCR....$1395 at Williams Magnavox Furniture Store.
It loaded with a tray that popped up after pushing a button. No remote..too early for them.
The only way to watch a movie was to wait for the store to order one in and hope to get there first to rent it.

The VCR was a heavy brute...I'll bet it weighed 20 lbs. (1980)

[KFC911]

We didn't have a TV in our house until '73 when I was 13... it was unusual, but certainly not newsworthy .

We had outdoors

[stevej37]

^^^ You prob had one of those fancy colored tv's.
We had black and white with no remote. (I think it was a huge 15" model)

[KFC911]

19" Color TV .... no console

My outside wuz even bigger tho

[jyl]

I was a bit of a computer geek back in the day, but now they are just a tool, a very important one.

My main workstation is getting on - it is a ThinkStation circa 2019. Last year I bought another ThinkStation with i9 CPU, 96GB RAM, etc. Boy am I glad I bought it then. That RAM would be $700 now.

[GH85Carrera]

I bought my first computer, a Commodore Vic 20 with 4K of RAM. I knew that was not enough ram, so I bought the 16K add on memory module that would get very warm. It had a cassette tape for program loading and saving, and it was crazy slow. I had a manual dial 300 baud modem. I could watch and read as the text on a BBS was downloaded.

Then I moved up the massive memory of the Commodore 64 and floppy drive. I only bought two floppies as one for all of my programs, and one as a backup.

That was replaced with my first PC, a massive 256K and twin floppies. I quickly added the memory to max it out at 640K and a huge 10 MB hard drive.

I went through a series of 286, 386 and 486 PCs and when I got my first 100 MB hard and 4MB of memory I figured is was about the end of upgrades.

This is typed on my work machine, 18.9 TB ot total storage, 256 GB of RAM and two 19GB video cards, and an i9 9960X CPU at 3.10 GHz. It is close to 5 years old, and runs Window 11 Pro Version 25H2 and the latest updates.



Only on a few projects have I come close to using all the memory. It churns for days sometime on large aerial photo projects.

I have built all my computers from parts I picked out since the mid 1980s.

[Paul T]

My first “computer” was a radio shack TRS-80 pocket computer with a cassette tape drive. I think I was around 10 yrs old. Moved from that to an Apple II clone (forget the name, Franklin maybe?)…after a couple of those I moved to an IBM personal computer - can’t recall the model but I remember it had a 10mb hard drive which I thought was all the memory one could ever need! This was in the days of 2400 baud modems, and you went and made a sandwich while you waited for a page to load, lol. Fun times. In my 20’s I felt like there was an ever so brief moment when I was “up to speed” on all things computer related, now I feel lost in the wind….amazing where tech has gone in 40 yrs…

[masraum]

Originally Posted by john70t

3D spinning fan monitors. The moving parts will no longer be required someday.
CAD will become amazing. Entertainment becomes completely immersive and interactive. Walk through your favorite movie and help the protagonist finish the task.
https://holofanco.com/
https://aiholofan.com/product/hdmi-65cm-holographic-fan/

Videos of this are going to be a great boon to YT, TT, etc... as folks continually walk into spinning fans.

[masraum]

Originally Posted by john70t

(there's lots of threads/posts but not a central one)

Or days, for very little to happen. We got our first PC (a Commodore 64) in the fall of 1982. Yes, there was a manual that came with it that had programs to type out, and my dad had some magazines that had programs to type out. I never attempted it (I was 12 and had better things to do than type for days). My dad did attempt it, and due to his typos and/or typos in the program, he then spend a ton of time debugging it to get it to work. When it finally worked, a red circle bounced on the screen.

Basic was a major turn-off of programming for me. Too much work for too little result. I wonder if something else would have sparked my interest differently.

[Shaun @ Tru6]