Posted by MassiveProng on 01/30/07 01:29

On Mon, 29 Jan 2007 22:15:01 GMT, bv@wjv.com (Bill Vermillion) Gave
us:

>In article <mn.eb287d711dbb26b2.1980@nobody.invalid>,
>Gene E. Bloch <hamburger@NOT_SPAM.invalid> wrote:
>>On 1/29/2007, Bill Vermillion posted this:
>>
>><Paper Reduction Activity>
>>
>>> Pushing Usenet news around - primarily by UUCP over phones - except
>>> for two large local engineering groups who had a 56 line - most of
>>> us in the Orlando area moved to Telebit modems that gave us
>>> 18Kbit/sec transfer rates [later about 22Kb] long before the
>>> first 9600 bps modem was available for sale. Since we all had
>>> registered UUCP domain names we got them at 1/2 price at $650 each.
>>>
>>> The next year I saw my first 9600 BPS modem. From BT [British
>>> Telecom] . $5000 US.
>>>
>>> Bill
>>
>>Ouch.
>>
>>Just yesterday, reading the Sunday paper ads, I noticed a 300GB hard
>>drive for $80, so in a fit of reminiscence I compared its $/MB to my
>>first hard drive: 10 MB, $800.
>
>If we're playing un-upsmanship - my first HD was an 8MB eight-inch
>that I got for $1500 as part of an as-is where-is closeout
>on Radio Shack Model 16's. It came with Xenix and the kernel
>on the 1.3.? was only about 78K long. And I decided to get the
>full development system - that was $750. But within 6 months it
>had all paid for itself, and I inadvertantly wound up being a
>self-employed SA/HW/SW person - all by accident.
>
>>I came up with a factor 3,000,000, but then I checked my work,
>>and realized it was *only* 300,000 (that's the problem with
>>computing in my head). This much change in maybe 22 or 24 years.
>
>Just fire up 'bc' and be sure of your math. Don't forget to set
>the scale :-)
>
>>The performance is improved some too, but not that much :-)
>
>What do you mean NOT THAT MUCH.
>
>I just moved to another terminal session and logged into a system
>I'm just building up to replace an aging server. With nothing
>extraordinary with a 150Mhz SATA 150GB drive, I just measured
>82MB/sec writing and 80MB reading.
>
>My first ESDI drive [ I misjudged how popular SCSI would become]
>had a 1.5Mhz interface [most cards were 1MHz] so that meant
>on a good day going down hill with the wind at my back I could
>get a bit over 1MB transfer rate on a UFS file system. The old
>S51 file system from AT&T - which I had on the same drive - was at
>least 5 times slower because of the inefficieny of that FS - with
>allocating 2 512 byte sectors at a time instead of 8K allocations.
>
>
>>Gene E. Bloch (Gino)
>>letters617blochg3251
>>(replace the numbers by "at" and "dotcom")
>
>I do not miss the old days - it's too much fun now!
>

The word for today is "GADGETS"

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