7 Simple Tasks That Would Have Been Magic Back in the Day

ProjectVulcan4241d ago (Edited 4241d ago )

I personally like the Cray XMP. Fastest computer in the world in 1985.

It cost $15m dollars. Each 1.2GB hard drive was $100k. Thats around $32m today, and $220k for each drive. Typical setup might have 8 drives, so nearly $1.8m in today's money for 10GB storage.

The machine itself is roughly the size of a small shed. It weighed around 1.5 tons. It had a large capacity refrigerant cooling system.

It consumed 60kw of power to run, that is 60,000 watts. SIXTY. THOUSAND. Just think about that power consumption for a moment. Thats 80 horsepower, so basically it needed as much power to run as your average hatchback/compact car engine running at peak rpm!

Its peak performance was 800 megaflops full tilt. It had 32mb of RAM.

I have a Galaxy s3, like many other people. Its not a cheap phone, but well within the reach of millions to buy. 20 million sold. It comes with at least 16Gb of internal memory.

It weighs just 133 grams. Its volume is less than 83 cubic millimetres. Its power consumption is just a few watts, the chipset itself less than a dozen at full tilt. It can get a bit warm, but not too bad :-)

But amazingly of all, the Mali GPU all by ITSELF runs at over 10 gigaflops. Every S3 has at least 1024mb of RAM.

That is more than 10 times the performance of a Cray XMP. For maybe the equivalent of 1/50000th the cost today!

Imagine if you will showing someone at Cray in 1985 your Galaxy S3. Pulling it out of your pocket casually. Telling them how badly it trounces their baby. :-)

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SantistaUSA4241d ago

Nice post, now imagine 27 years from today and things we will be comparing then! Probably like, you guys used to charge your cell phone daily? That's so lame, our phones can last 5 years on one charge lol :-P

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tachy0n4241d ago

noticed how technology exploded since the 1980's?

its the highest technological jump humans ever had. wanna know why? thank the extraterrestrials.

like previous area 51 employees have said, while in the outside world computers were using vacuum tubes for computing, The Area 51 already had fully working motherboard and CPU's up and running.

go figure.

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Pushagree4240d ago

Go on and tell us next about how the tooth fairy and the easter bunny planned your suprise birthday party in Narnia.

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tachy0n4240d ago

@Pushagree

explain to everybody how technology got this jump, in less than 20-30 years, when it took almost 1500 years to discover the earth was flat?

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Pushagree4238d ago (Edited 4238d ago )

The "jump" you speak of is incredibly overexaggerated, but i'll answer anyways. Humanity has been able to make great strides in such a short amount of time because of a simple thing called the industrial revolution. That brought a standard of living to the masses that has never been seen before in human histrory. Because of that, education became open to the masses and more people could focus on their brains instead of worrying about when they were going to eat next. Things like engineering and computer programming were quick to follow afterward.

In short, the progress you see is simply the result of being out of the dark ages for the first time in 1500 years. There is no magic or conspiracy to it. Trying to rationalize it that way only shows how ignorant you really are.

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thebudgetgamer4241d ago

I love this type of stuff, you can go back even further. Say a little over a hundred years ago (witch seems like a lot but in the big picture is nothing) if you told people they would be able to take a plane from New York to California in three hours they would have thought you were talking silly.

Less than two hundred years ago it would have taken you a year, and most of the people would have died on the way.

Crazay4241d ago (Edited 4241d ago )

These sort of articles crack me up. I remember the first USB memory stick I ever sold that what 8MB of storage and cost $249.99 Just the other day I picked up a 64GB USB 3 memory stick for $30.

And now to really make me sound dated, I remember walking about 2 blocks and around a corner to catch my school bus(uphill both ways barefoot naturally) whereas now the kids either get picked up in front of their houses or the parents drop them off and pick them up.

=P

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KrimsonKody4241d ago

One thing that I still consider to be 'magic' is console evolution.
15-20 years ago, we had games that used a console (Genesis, Super Nintendo, etc.), but nowadays, you can have all those consoles & games compacted into the palm of your hand.
I would've never thought that was possible.

PS;
I thought the Sega Nomad was sooo amazing!

Crazay4241d ago

It even had a TV tuner attachment for $150

jerethdagryphon4241d ago

nomad was and is amazing for what it did

but think on this 1960s spys used tiny rolls of film and had to have a tiny camera as well, all to store maybe 10 -20 photos imagine what theyd think of a basic sd medmory card camera
or even a decent camera phone