Oh, those powerful computers!

You often hear about how computers keep getting so much faster and bigger. Well, here's an interesting thing I just found. I stumbled upon a web page where a few users had mentioned how much memory was being dedicated by their browser (Chrome) for the tab they were currently viewing (the same one they were posting to). They described using the Chrome task manager to see this usage.

So, I invoked it (Shift-esc will do it), and sure enough, all my tabs were there indicating the amount of memory dedicated to each. The page I was viewing was using over 70 mb.

Being an old-school programmer for almost 25 years, it brought to mind that some of the early computers had as little as 2 kb total memory. That's not a typo. In 2 kb of memory sat (whatever was currently needed of) the operating system, control blocks to manage the computer, the user's program, and some amount of data. Back then, one of a programmer's biggest challenges was to find ingenious ways of minimizing storage requirements. If your program was too big, you had to slice it and dice it (called overlays) so that you could use the same storage area to load only the piece you needed to perform a specific function at that specific moment in time.

Then, I looked at the page in my tab and noticed that perhaps 80% of the page was blank space. We have come a very long way since those first computers which came shortly after the wheel was invented. Computers are so much faster and bigger, now. When you need 70 mb of silicon just to display perhaps 2 kb of data, it'd better be damn big and fast. Funny thing is, that despite the leaps and bounds of advancement in hardware technology, the software has gotten decidedly more stupid.

This is understandable since in the old days, the few hundred programmers that were employed in a large city were all that were needed and so represented la creme de la creme. Today, just about everyone needs to be a "programmer", no matter how poor their talent and aptitude. Armies of people "earn" their living in information processing. The ingenuity of the programmer has been replaced by the ingenuity of the hardware developer--making bigger and faster machines capable of supporting even the most unimaginative programmer. Of course, they are rarely called "programmers", anymore. They are "developers", mostly just shuffling things around on a screen.

The above does not apply to operating system developers, etc. I do realize there are still some bastions of low-level programmers around.

I can't imagine what the heck the other 69.9 mb is being used for. I guess I'm not quite as imaginative as I thought I was.


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My, what big drives you have, grandma

Recently, I found myself in need of a high-capacity USB drive. After assessing what was on the market, I settled on a 16 GB. HP model. It was the minimum I needed and although I paid a little bit more than similar capacity models, it had the advantage of actually being in stock. In the running was only one other model, the Sandisk offering which I had read often gets "locked" in read-only mode for which there is no "fix" to unlock it. But what really sold me on the HP device was its size.

This evening, while still marvelling at its minuscule dimensions, I decided to take a photo of it and offer up a comparison of it and older storage devices. I've been involved in the tech industry since the early 70's and I did a little research this evening to demonstrate how far we've come since then.

Pictured below is a string of six state-of-the-art IBM 3350 hard disk drives first released in 1975 made for large mainframes. They were far faster and much higher capacity than the previous generation of drives. Each drive had a capacity of about 318 MB. The entire string in the image had a capacity of just under 2 GB. As you can see, each single drive enclosure was about the size of an apartment-sized washer or dryer.

Here is a photo of my new thumb drive:

The dimensions are approximately 1 1/8 in. x 1/2 in. x 1/4 in. And half the device is nothing more than the connector. The actual storage area is about a half inch cube! As I said, the capacity is 16 GB. Compared to the old technology, this new device has a data capacity of more than 50 times a single 3350, and more than 8 times the capacity of the entire 6-device string.

Finally, I paid about $15 for my USB drive. Cost of a single IBM 3350 drive in 1975 was over $30,000. No, I did not misplace the decimal.

Note: 3350's came in pairs. The price above reflects half the cost of a 3350 pair.


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