Ghosts of computers past
Dec. 8th, 2004 07:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ellarienOne of this month's books is The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss. It's an amusing read, though a little dated now. Reading on the bus this morning, I was brought up short by a mention of 10Gb being the largest commercially available hard drive. That sounds about right for the 1995 publication date. I think it was 1998 when my work computer acquired three 9Gb external disk packs, and 2001 when we abandoned them as no longer worth bothering with. The new work computer has a terabyte of RAID storage built in, and I've seen consumer 1Tb drives advertized.
What worries me, though, is that progress seems to have stalled a bit lately, at least on the processor front.
In 1993, I bought a 25MHz 386; in 1997, a 120MHz Pentium laptop; in 2000, a 700MHz Pentium 3 desktop and a 650MHz laptop. None of these was exactly bleeding-edge at the time. This year, as Old Laptop was getting a little flakey, I was hoping for another factor of 5 in processing speed to justify replacing it. I ended up settling for 2.8GHz, in a distinctly chunky Sony Vaio with a 1.5lb power adapter. It's a nice machine, at about half the price of that 1997 Pentium, but it would be even nicer at half the size, and that wasn't -- and still isn't -- available at any price. Six months on, it doesn't look as though there's been much advance at all on the high-powered laptop front. Maybe it doesn't matter for most purposes. Maybe even the latest Office software doesn't really need 4GHz, though I'd think the antivirus could find a use for it. But I've lived all my adult life with faster and faster computers, and it's strange to think of that slowing down.
The other thing that started me wandering down memory lane was the news that IBM is getting out of the PC business.
When I started my first postdoc job in 1988, we had several IBM PS/2 machines, with 5Mhz 8086 processors, monochrome EGA screens, 640Mb of RAM, and 20Mb hard drives that chirped like a nestful of blackbirds. You could back up the whole thing, uncompressed, on a couple of boxes of floppies. One of them had Windows 1.0, which we occasionally fired up for curiousity's sake but found no actual use for.
Even I could swap drives and expansion cards in those boxes; the interesting thing was that they would only fit genuine IBM drives, which were a little tricky to order because the company was reluctant to divulge the required part numbers. At least once, we bought a whole new machine rather than replace the hard drive -- and then found uses for the diskless one. When I went to South Africa to help deploy an observing system, we shipped one of the PS/2s out under carnet for me to program on while its clone ran the system; the following year I hand-carried a replacement floppy drive to Chile, and as carefully carried the busted one back. Programming them (in BASIC) to run a small automated observatory was ... challenging. Fortunately, I was only one contributor to that project.
We stuck with those machines and their descendants for a few years because of the perceived IBM reliability factor, despite those dead drives, before we finally went to generic 33MHz 486dx2 boxes and a 386 laptop for field trips. Those did have some reliability problems, but replacement parts were cheap, and we never went back. When I left that job in early '95, at least one of the IBM boxes was still around, sans hard drive, running a print server off a virtual disk.
These days, IBM PC mostly means 'ThinkPad'; black, beautiful laptops with those funny little eraserhead pointing devices. I gave my first international PowerPoint presentation on a borrowed one, and used a crossover cable in a hotel lobby in Tenerife to transfer a file from one to another so one colleague could surprise another with a birthday greeting. I could never justify buying one for myself, but I've had it at the back of my mind that one day I might qualify for one. Now I never will, or if the brand carries on, it won't have that IBM badge.
What worries me, though, is that progress seems to have stalled a bit lately, at least on the processor front.
In 1993, I bought a 25MHz 386; in 1997, a 120MHz Pentium laptop; in 2000, a 700MHz Pentium 3 desktop and a 650MHz laptop. None of these was exactly bleeding-edge at the time. This year, as Old Laptop was getting a little flakey, I was hoping for another factor of 5 in processing speed to justify replacing it. I ended up settling for 2.8GHz, in a distinctly chunky Sony Vaio with a 1.5lb power adapter. It's a nice machine, at about half the price of that 1997 Pentium, but it would be even nicer at half the size, and that wasn't -- and still isn't -- available at any price. Six months on, it doesn't look as though there's been much advance at all on the high-powered laptop front. Maybe it doesn't matter for most purposes. Maybe even the latest Office software doesn't really need 4GHz, though I'd think the antivirus could find a use for it. But I've lived all my adult life with faster and faster computers, and it's strange to think of that slowing down.
The other thing that started me wandering down memory lane was the news that IBM is getting out of the PC business.
When I started my first postdoc job in 1988, we had several IBM PS/2 machines, with 5Mhz 8086 processors, monochrome EGA screens, 640Mb of RAM, and 20Mb hard drives that chirped like a nestful of blackbirds. You could back up the whole thing, uncompressed, on a couple of boxes of floppies. One of them had Windows 1.0, which we occasionally fired up for curiousity's sake but found no actual use for.
Even I could swap drives and expansion cards in those boxes; the interesting thing was that they would only fit genuine IBM drives, which were a little tricky to order because the company was reluctant to divulge the required part numbers. At least once, we bought a whole new machine rather than replace the hard drive -- and then found uses for the diskless one. When I went to South Africa to help deploy an observing system, we shipped one of the PS/2s out under carnet for me to program on while its clone ran the system; the following year I hand-carried a replacement floppy drive to Chile, and as carefully carried the busted one back. Programming them (in BASIC) to run a small automated observatory was ... challenging. Fortunately, I was only one contributor to that project.
We stuck with those machines and their descendants for a few years because of the perceived IBM reliability factor, despite those dead drives, before we finally went to generic 33MHz 486dx2 boxes and a 386 laptop for field trips. Those did have some reliability problems, but replacement parts were cheap, and we never went back. When I left that job in early '95, at least one of the IBM boxes was still around, sans hard drive, running a print server off a virtual disk.
These days, IBM PC mostly means 'ThinkPad'; black, beautiful laptops with those funny little eraserhead pointing devices. I gave my first international PowerPoint presentation on a borrowed one, and used a crossover cable in a hotel lobby in Tenerife to transfer a file from one to another so one colleague could surprise another with a birthday greeting. I could never justify buying one for myself, but I've had it at the back of my mind that one day I might qualify for one. Now I never will, or if the brand carries on, it won't have that IBM badge.
