Cracked - Hey, remember the good old days, when technology's refusal to advance at a rapid enough pace effectively handcuffed all the fun you could have had as a child to a radiator and forced you to play outdoors instead like some kind of freak show? If not, this will help.
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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. :-)
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.
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?
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.
Less than two hundred years ago it would have taken you a year, and most of the people would have died on the way.
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
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!
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