1982: The Future of COMPUTER STORAGE | The Computer Programme | Retro Tech | BBC Archive
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 พ.ค. 2024
- "Data, it's been around for thousands of years, but now it's running into trouble." - Ian McNaught-Davis
Chris Serle and Ian McNaught-Davis consider storing and retrieving information in the age of the microprocessor. The sheer amount of information that computers can generate, and the speed at which they can do it, has left traditional means of information storage - namely books - unable to keep pace. What is the solution?
Chris and Mac look at the evolution of computer storage, from the humble punch card to floppy disks, video discs and hard-drives.
Clip taken from The Computer Programme, originally broadcast on BBC One, 1 February 1982.
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4 decades later and we have 4k video on our mobile phones. It's incredible the speed that technology has progressed.
Not just 4K video but any video in the world that anyone has published.
@@AndrewWilsonStooshie very true, accessibility is also incredible. Imagine things in 50 years!
@@apeshitmediaHover boards and flying cars obviously.
And people taking videos vertically.
Yes. 4K video on a 6 inch screen. The phones got smarter. The people didn't.
Now we have memory cards in our phones as tiny as your little finger nail that store hundreds of albums full of music, movies, thousands of photographs etc.
Amazing.
Yep, a £80 fingernail sized 1TB MicroSD card has enough data capacity to store around 1.25 million books. Which is around 15 times as many books that where being stored in that large library.
It's utterly mind blowing when you really think about it.
I remember watching these computer programmes in the early 1980s. I never imagined I'd be watching them again with such nostalgia in the 2020s.
On your telephone, on the go, from anywhere in the world.
Something I learned from this video: the origin of the word byte = "by eight"
Right!
the trouble with that etymology is that originally bytes weren't necessarily 8 bits. Some computers in the 1960s had 6 or 9 bits in a byte.
What @marnanel said. Adding slightly: eight-bit bytes were actually quite unusual in the very early days. Machines often had an 18-bit or 36-bit ‘word’ (and there were also those that worked in decimal using e.g. ‘two-out-of-five’ code, and not binary as we know it).
It was the IBM S/360 family and later the PDP-11 that really popularised the use of 8-bit bytes. (Also, Cray-1 was ahead of its time here, curiously, but not many organisations had a Cray.)
By the time home micros arrived, all of the main choices of CPU for them used 8-bit bytes.
@@marnanel I looked into this a little on Wikipedia and sources there say the term, as coined by Werner Buchholz, referred to the smallest amount of information a computer could process, or "bite" off at a time. Spelling it as "byte" was to avoid confusion if mutated from "bite" to "bit".
It was just the amount of bits that a computer would store a character in. Not necessarily eight. It was a “bite” of data that was spelled “byte” to avoid confusion with “bit”.
This is incredibly accurate and knowledgeable reporting for its time. It's easy to forget (or not even know) how much more intelligent the average computer user had to be back then.
Thank You :)
Older computers were both much more complicated, and much more simple. Modern systems abstract much of the "complicated" bits away from the user with elaborate coding and great deals more processing power. Whereas the older computers were simple enough for a single person to understand the entire working of one machine.
Ian McNaught-Davis made it to 2014 so he thankfully lived long enough to see 'the future'. What an amazing person, full of knowledge and able to convey it effortlessly (as it seems, were most of the 'real' presenters of that era).
I feel very lucky to have lived and learnt through that time.
And he climbed the Old Man of Hoy on TV!! Google it, you won't be disappinted.
Matthew Broderick uses a dual IMSAI FDC-2 8-inch floppy drive (9:22) in the 1983 film ‘War Games’.
Can you imagine a program this technical being on mainstream TV today?
No, except with naked dancers to keep the audience entertain.
I’m sure the “NO PET PEEVES” title that Max mentioned was a play on words relating to the Commodore Pet, as the rest of the title mentioned the Commodore VIC20.
Correct. Wonder if they knew what it meant but were just leaving as an inside joke for some of the audience.
The irony that the VIC-20 was originally the MicroPet.
11:23 - BBC Micro and a Philips VideoDisc player. Memories!
I would have loved to spend an afternoon in that library with "Mac" and Chris Serle back in 1982.
I bet you would ;)
Don't forget Freff!
Tom Baker's brother?
You watch Look Around You even once, and everything in these old programmes begins to sound like it.
Lol, Peter Serafinowicz is definitely channelling Chris Serle is series 2 of Look Around You.
The other way round. :)
The studio segments on this channel always make me think of Look Around You, while the filmed interviews with a member of the public (like the recent garden astronomer one) always have the air of a slow-starting Python sketch. Both were of course just sending-up that style, which already existed, but are now much more popular than the material they were lambasting.
Synthesiser Patel might argue that the source of the endearing sendup was Tomorrow's World. That is if he wasn't chasing synthesiser thieves - crime's so bloody bad, you know.
@@simonrussell4986 you probably know about it already, but if you haven’t seen Still Game he plays a shopkeeper in that and has some of the best lines. A very similar attitude to troublemakers as Synthesiser Patel as well!
I was getting pretty excited by the end of the video! 3000 books on a single video disc!
It won't be long before we can buy 900 classic themes on a two record set for $14.99. Two records!
And pretty soon we will have to teach kids what a book was.
We were still using disk-packs like the one you see at 9:36 in the RAF Air Defence System in the early 2000s.
My friend was raiding his garage for parts to keep Reuters disc computers going in 2005.
The US Military still uses Floppy Disk to run some of its computers because it’s impossible to hack or to copy unlike today’s system
@anthonykoller4459 Nonsense. Those old machines were easy to hack. You simply can't hack something that is not connected to the net!
Who remembers the BBC Doomsday Project - hints of it in this video using the laserdisc.
I used one recently at the Computer Museum in Cambridge. Its quite an experience to use as it feels like an early google maps where you can select any place on the UK map and then read 'reviews' of what its like to live there plus look at local pictures. Where i grew up teenagers seemed to do a lot of Morris dancing.
Used it on the children's ward i Exeter Wonford in 1989 after one of my many teeth operations. Got so sucked into it I begged them to let me stay for the rest of the day... :)
I was part of the team that made the master discs. Good times at Mullard Blackburn!
The good old days when the BBC educated viewers without patronising the audience and without annoying background music. And I had one of those BBC micro computers, bought it with the proceeds of working during university holidays - before student grants were abolished and before Polytechnics were transformed into Universities.
I couldn't afford a BBC Micro and had to do with a rubbery keys Spectrum. Today I'm using a minisforum UM780 XTX Mini PC with an Oculink connection to my eGPU(external Graphics Processing Unit). I have a large Tower gaming PC standing Idle. my mini PC does everything my gaming PC does but at a fraction of the size and uses less power than an old fashioned light bulb. When gaming I just turn on the eGPU, it uses more power of course but it will play any game I throw at it, It will even run my VR setup. I predict in 5 years I wont even need an eGPU to play even the most demanding simulations.
@@iamrocketray Somehow Commodore 64 with the best keyboard were never big in the UK unlike in the rest of the world.
@@bardo0007 At the time Cambridge in UK was the home of innovation in Micro PC's. And apart from the price I wouldn't have considered a Commodore 64 because British made PC's had their operating system on an EPROM(a writable chip) and American PC's had to have the OS loaded from disc.
@@iamrocketray Nope OS BASIC/KERNAL was on ROM for the C-64. So you could start programming in BASIC , just like with ZX Spectrum when you switched it on.
@@bardo0007 I didn't know that, I would have loved a commadore 64 but like the BBC micro it was way out of my price league so I didn't give it very much attention.
I vaguely remember the TV program on the BBC, this was the start of my career in computing
Speak for yourself! Soviet Physics Letters Volumes are the perfect holiday reading - but now I take it on Kindle so there’s more room for duty free on return leg
One of my old colleagues was a translator for these Soviet Physics journals. They are packed with invaluable information.
It's fascinating and slightly scary to watch programmes like this with the benefit of perfect hindsight. I was 24 years old at the time this was originally broadcast. What, I wonder will they make of 2024's storage capacity 42 years from now?
I used to love that show back in the day.
I remember when I started my career in 1974 we had slide rules, then LED calculators arrived! Oh how things have changed.
My parents were born deaf, so when I moved to Canada snail mail was the medium of contact. Now we use IPads and FaceTime and can easily talk to each other.
Wow that must have been strange for you and them
@@edmundpower1250 not really just normal, I grew up in a Deaf community, nobody used phones.
This hints at just how mind-blowingly revolutionary the CD was as a portable storage device. That bar fridge sized hard drive holds 1MB, a CD holds 800MB. It was just insane at the time. It took a fair while but when the writable CD-R finally came along, it was a total game changer. For a little while and then flash drives got big.
My external drive today is 4 Terrabyte! No need for CD's anymore.
The legendary Ian McNaught-Davis. (‘Mac’)
(Ronnie Barker voice) Later in the programme we'll be interviewing three legendary British computer scientists: Ian McNaught-Davis, Ian McOne-Davis, and Ian McOne-Naught-Davis.
@@marnanel - Brilliant! (It’s good night from me). 👓 👓
I wonder if he was related to the Terrahawks Zeroids
When the BBC did things properly. Our family business bought it's first pc in 1982, from memory it was called a Sirius. Can't recall the spec but it was one of the fastest of it's time. Oh the excitement when it printed the first invoice!! Of course the transformational technology was the internet, that made computers relevant to everyone on an everyday level, then the smartphone established it as essential. Books are still a passion for me though, nothing else can replace their tactile pleasure, but I buy them online!!
BBC was at its peak around here and the very thing they're talking about will be the thing that ruins them!
From memory, a Victor Sirius was 8088 (cut-down 8086) with 128K memory, upgradable to 800K-ish of RAM and a weird form of floppy drive.
@@jgharston
You are possibly correct, I just can't remember the details and all the records, and the pc itself are long gone. However, I do still have a couple of the Tulip PC's from our later multi terminal network system, and the ms dos user manuals that were supplied with them. The file server was a 286 machine, with a mighty 80 MB hard drive!!!
The most voluminous series of books ever published in one go was a series called "British Parliamentary Papers, 1800-1900" reaching 1070 bulky folio volumes , containing indexed excerpts on all kinds of aspects of 19th century politics, legislation and society from the protocols of Westminster during the era (it was prepared to be of help for historical and social research, of course). The volumes were big and bulky,, no doubt fairly fine print and many of them running close to a thousand pages each.- I think we can assume that the entire set had the same amount of text as between 3 and 4 million pages of ordinary books.
These days, you can easily cram around a million pages of raw text into one GB of data, so the full set would run to like 3-4 GB...something you could easily load into a USB stick and carry in your pocket! :)
I still have a soft spot for libraries with real books, including scholarly books and works of history.
❤
BS, each respective parliamentary journals runs at 1.3 GB-OCRed and as a PDF
@@NathanDudani I was thinking of digitized as pure text files, like the works of many classic authors at the Gutenberg site.
@@NathanDudaniis that one of those PDFs with the pictures embedded though? That will inflate the data size significantly.
It was all so futuristic at the time.
"The Soviet Technical Physics Letter...
Dear Ivan,
I want to talk to you about the effect of an external electric field on the velocity of a surface acoustic wave in a lithium niobate single crystal."
That is like a homework problem you have to derive it yourself with the more basic equations they're not just giving it away
Did you see that!? he played a video!! on a 1982 computer! fascinating!
must of come straight from the video disc. Not sure but never seen one do that before. I`ve got a BBC Acorn 3000 in my living room. I`ll try and find out.
It will have done yes. The BBC Micro couldn't play back a respectable video clip itself
An early version of the Domesday Project equipment!
I used to load disk cartridges like that (though with a bit less banging!) with the RL02 drives attached to a PDP11 computer. Their capacity was... 10MB!!! That was 1978-85.
I scrapped one of those in 1999 because it wasn't Y2K compliant. The PDP11 went to a collector but the RL02 drives (still working) went into the skip. Best not to think about that now.
9:20
I remember as a kid in the 80's my computer took those large thin floppy disks.
The Xerox word processor of 1984 had advanced from 18-inch to ten-inch floppies.
@@TheDavidlloydjones - Ten-inch? Surely they would have been eight-inch, (shown in the video at 9:22), the industry standard of the day? (Superseded by five-inch). I’ve never heard of eighteen-inch floppy disks.
@@AtheistOrphan
Yes, now that I think of it, mine had 8" floppy
Yes and also the sound of the dot matrix printer - heavenly.
@@TheDavidlloydjones - Having done a bit more research and consulted with some old IT professionals, I can confirm that both the ‘Eighteen-inch’ and ‘Ten-inch’ floppies you mentioned never existed. Indeed, an ‘Eighteen-inch’ floppy would simply be impossible to work.
Excelent presentation.
I am not sure if I feel old that I'm 2 years younger than this video, or whether I should be impressed how quickly it all went.
11:20 And indeed it did do exactly this in the future in the form of the BBC Domesday Project. I remember having access to a Domesday terminal at school and thinking how incredible it was!
That orange ME29 mainframe at 10:20 brought back some memories. I was using one of them at work in around 88-89 and remember going to get discs from the store to put in the drives and using some hefty double-deck hostess trolley thing to wheel about 8 of those disc platters back. Just changing a disc was a 30 min job with all the walking around. I remember the computer room had a halon type fire system in it which (I was told) had pressure pads in the floor to make sure there was no-one in there when it went off...!
I remember 1983 in high school (UK) we had a full IBM Winchester 'server' in our school, we learnt BASIC programming, but it is hard to think 4 decades later how things are today! If I remember it was only a few hundred Mb (which was huge back then) Now I have a home PC with two 2Tb Nvme drives, two 1 Tb SSD's, one 1Tb 'spinny' HDD, 64Gb RAM, a 6 core processor, and a 12Gb GPU! A lot of this tech' in my PC is already 'out of date'! Things are moving so fast, and only getting quicker! I also remember dial up for the internet (I was still using this 10 years ago) Now I have 1Gb per second download and 200 Mbps upload, I can download 18gb of information in around a minute....how long would that have taken with dial up!....days I would think!
Chris Serle and Mac. They played the man in the street and the expert brilliantly.
It shows at least in the studio shots just how good analog PAL was compared to NTSC of the time.
The BBC does have some pretty amazing technology to separate luma and chroma though; the PAL Transform Decoder.
It works in the frequency domain and uses the complimentary phase shift from line to line caused by PAL inverting the V chroma carrier and resulting spectral symmetry in the chroma subcarrier to quite precisely determine what is luma and what is chroma, better than any regular comb filter can.
With traditional notch filtering or even an adaptive comb filter it would not have looked this good. It's almost as if they'd recorded it as Y/C from the start. 🙂
@@ZacabebOTG IT does look good. Lived in the UK with a dual standard PAL/NTSC Sony Trinitron. My only complaint about PAL was the 50hz flicker. Still, the difference in resolution was day and night. Now with digital television, it looks very good globally. BBC radio was also very good with regards to sound quality, lack of commercials and live concerts. Really liked that. Have not listened to FM in nearly 20 years. I presume that since the BBC is not constrained by "commercial" issues, they spent more on quality. Still, looking at some of the BBC video in this space really showcases just how good analog can be and yes, even done right NTSC can look very very good. I think that the major complaints were with regards to early NTSC color equipment before solid state and the improved circuits. But still, 525 lines compared to 625 makes a difference. Just my take as a casual observer.
BBC FM is still far better than DAB on anything from a good entry level Denon or Sony tuner from the early 90s... DAB+ is pretty good, but my 1993 Sony (a tenner from a charity shop a few years back) stays. Even the tuning rotary encoder (digital synthesis) is weighted and metal. Absolutely lush bit of kit.
As a retired broadcast engineer, the old joke was NTSC, never the same colour, PAL, perfection at last. The French and Russians may argue too about SECAM being better than both.
I can't imagine these presenters could have conceived of how much we'd take this for granted in the near future. This really was a game-changing tine period right here.
Ian Mac could - he was a visionary ahead of his time
As someone born in 1980, I consider myself somewhat lucky to have really grown up with the home computer and all its potential, without them overly dominating my most formative years. I’ve nowt against the internet or tablets (given I’m typing on a tablet now, over the internet that’d be very silly), just glad my entertainment didn’t rely on it as a kid.
Same and even my computer interested son (who has studied and worked in the computer field) says he would rather have grown up during the 1980’s with the first computer technologies which he says he would have found exciting but without the ability to be bound to a personal device.
The internet isn’t the problem. It’s social media and how it’s damaging society.
I was also born in 1980 and remember first using the internet as a teen back in the mid 90’s and getting my first pc around the same time. Good memories. We also had Commodore computers back in the 80’s.
Seeing that old ICL dumb terminal takes me back.
We had a Series 39 mainframe, though I think it replaced a Series 2900 before I started working there.
Ooh, 50fps uploads! The sections shot on video (as opposed to film) look wonderful.
And who hasn't lost a micro SD card?
me
Me.
Me, this morning!
@@kieronparr3403 I didn't lose one this morning either! (Well, it's only 10:45 so there still time I suppose.)
@@fburton8 just found mine. Good luck
These were the types of hardware I used when I worked as a mainframe computer operator and programmer in the 1980s. Good times.
The BBC Micro. What a brilliant under rated machine.
We were introduced to punched cards as a data input method for mainframe computers, and I literally knew, this couldn’t possibly be hanging around long. I just knew I’d not be interested until that malarkey was over. The pace of development was actually pretty slow because this stuff had limited sales numbers back then. Hard work to use them. It’s much more interesting to me now, as a user, being able to create music on devices. Things really got going, once most people began using a computer daily, or indeed had a use for one at all. Thanks for the history lesson.
Nostalgia apart (and there is so much of that!), what I really miss from this era are the keyboards. They were chunky, satisfying and epic (with notable exceptions ;)
I`ve got a BBC Acorn 3000 in my living room. :)
You can buy a proper beam spring f-type for your pc today, buy they do cost a few hundred pounds. Worth it though.
Back then, they had little storage for important information. Now we have vast storage which is used to watch videos on mobile phones of people falling over. Oh, how we have evolved.
In my phone, I have a 1 TerraByte MicroSD card, about the size of a pinky finger nail .... crazy !
Thousands of years later and you can still read Egyptian hieroglyphs, I wonder how many floppy and laser discs will be readable in a thousand years.
Zero.
Floppy disks aren't reliable for long term memory storage. Even after 40 years, many of them are not readable anymore, especially when stored under bad conditions (moisture, heat, etc)
Agreed but at least our grandchildren won't have to rummage through thousands of old photographs in boxes.
Just spent ten days clearing out my late father's home with the aforementioned photos as well as slides and some negatives dating back to the 1930's. Actually bought myself an Epson V600 scanner and finding some lovely old photos of my great grandparents.
Problem for the kids will be finding thousands upon thousands of jpegs on computers, flash drives, SD cards, portable HDD and SSD drives etc!
We tend to snap pictures of anything and everything these days and copy onto drives to save them whereas in the "old days" we had a film roll of 24/36 so unlikely to go mad.
To be fair, of all the ancient Egyptian papyruses produced, the number that are still readable is pretty minuscule.
Let's not confuse the medium with the message 😅
@@fabianmckenna8197 and even in the old times: most pictures seen a million times other ones - often in better quality.
No photo bring back passed away people, sometimes is even good to forget (try to - the hurt often doesn't go away compete and kicks in the worst moments, so at least it is better not to force memory that make us sad.)
We’ve come so far in my lifetime.
At this time I had a 30Mb Winchester hard drive, very strange that he did not mention Winchester hard drives as they are much smaller than platter drives.
I worked as a contractor to Phillips (1979) in Eindhoven, Holland. We produced an 'Office of the future' system using the first data CD disc storage. I designed/wrote the file system. It was SLOW.....
I miss my BBC micro 🥲
"The home of the future is likely to become a center for incoming and outgoing electronic signals which will be used by the family to suit their particular needs." Well, that was quite accurate, wasn't it, Siri?
4:00 what's that you've got, BBC?
in 2005 I dreamed about how wonderful a small, silent, low power computer with internet access would be, as back then, there was a lot of written information and I was inclined to read it all.
We got that more or less with the mobile phone. It does 99.9% of everyones computing needs now.
I miss the sound of the Dot Matrix printer
It's the perfect background noise if you want to sleep
Ahhhh 20 years ago playing the PS2 with my 8MB memory card 🥲
Living through it, the progress never really seemed that quick, but I suppose it was. The biggest problem technology has created is it has severely reduced the time we're bored...boredom drives innovation; we've lost a generation of innovators because they were too busy playing MMOGs or binging Netflix.
10:53 - Fingerprints!
9:47 Why did he put the head of the robot from Lost In Space into that machine?
My maternal grandparents had a set of World Book Encyclopedias, in blue. Copyright date not known.
Now processed by a LLM in milliseconds 🤯
Ahhh, finite search. Those were the days!
software developers should watch videos like this to learn efficient coding.
back then there wasnt the memory or hard drive space for sloppy coding.... unlike today
This is a common trope, but the truth is that modern computers enable more people to develop more software that can be used to improve efficiency in many areas. The efficiencies of modern development outweigh the benefits of optimising code; there are diminishing returns in optimising code. Coders haven’t become sloppy because they have more storage and faster processors; there is just minimal (or no) benefit in developing ultra efficient and optimised code for most applications these days. For example, a simple algorithm on a modern computer might require thousands of lines of code (including libraries), and the code might be relatively inefficient, but it’s still going to run thousands (millions?) of times faster than a beautifully optimised version of the same algorithm that was developed 40 years ago.
A more practical example; I can create a user-friendly user input screen in a couple of hours, including all the error trapping and user-friendly elements. The resulting code might be 10,000 times ‘larger’ than something similar that was developed 40 years ago, but it will display faster, be easier to use and cost almost nothing in terms of storage and processing. Debugging is easy because it uses a common library that thousands of other developers are familiar with, and doesn’t require the unique knowledge of a developer who had to create a special encoding technique to save a few bytes of memory, or some weird trick to store off-screen characters in the computer’s printer buffer, which causes the device to crash when someone actually connects a printer.
@@Innesbyou make a good point however just expecting computer hardware and libraries to pick up the pieces will only get you so far. yes coputers are getting faster but people can write some truely horrible code is still horrible code and no amoutn of processing power will save your day.
you say debugging is easier but thats not always the case with false results given back when searching through code.
Then there are issues like async coding and race conditions. librabry debugging tools wont help you in those cases.
a good understanding of the code base are essential then. which comes back to writing efficent code.
in my line of work, we have ended up re-writing code that looked good at the time but now the software has a higher demand and the original code just wont scale to what is required now.
maybe if we took a more grounded approach in the past would save us time now.
Really is amazing how much storage we can hold these days. With current Micro SD cards topping out at 1.5TB for now, you easily hold almost 100TB of data in the palm of your hands and it would barley weigh anything 😮
My first HDD was 20 MB (MegaBytes), and I never ever fully filled it.
And now, I have nearly 80TB at home and I'm thinking of buying a few disks because it's nearly full.
Took a brief look at the whole programme as linked in the description, what is with the terrible quality and framerate? Would be nice if one day we could have a remastered
estored archive of all these programmes, like this and the Computer Chronicles. Also, my computer can store over one millions books, what what do I use is for? Games.
Laserdisc was rumored to be capable of storing like 25GB Of digital data using the red laser from a CD/DVD. That product never came to be.
Now we have blu-ray. And more is coming.
Takes me back to 1981 when I built a ZX81 kit with 1K of RAM and spent many hours writing code in BASIC. I'm still coding many years later and i still talk about the "top load" washing machines that used to be mainframe hard drives.
They were horrible years the 1980’s, so much unemployment and dread.
I had the 16k RAM pack. You could spend hours typing some code, knock the RAM pack and lose it all.
I shouldn't complain. My first Physics teacher at secondary school in the 80s encouraged me with science/engineering and recommended a book on an upcoming programming language - C ! Our local bookshop had to order it from the USA and it cost my poor Dad about £50 in 1983. Forty years later and with a PhD in Electronics I shouldn't be fazed by the pace of change, but my God, how far have we come. Moore's law.
@@drmal I remember the open PCB that stood vertically from a main board edge connector with 16 off, 1k ic's. Those were the good old days. I have spent the last 30 year writing PLC code, all from those humble beginnings.
6:21 they both wait 150 hours for the minified React to download first before they can see the number they want.
(* based on a 20MB Javascript download over 300 baud)
"It takes no time at all", he says while they sit staring at the screen for nearly a minute waiting for the result =D. Interestingly, much of all that paper and books they show in this, is very much still only in paper form and has yet to be digitized, so you still need to sift through these computer indexes to find what you're looking for, and then go for a walk to locate the actual material
This was 1982. Only five years later, in 1987, came the first proper CD-ROM drives for home computers (although they were super expensive) and everything they talked about in this program as being "in the far future", became present day tech. Computer technology evolved so incredibly fast in those days. Nowadays everything only becomes crappier each day and all this wonderful information is harder to find
I didn't know there were hard drives with removable platters!
Personally I'm loving living in the Video Disc era...
6:02 Guy at the terminal is the OG prompt jockey
I was waiting for him to type GO NORTH
1:55 No!! You must not read from the book!
10:27 that's a big ass CD.
"Mind your thumb" - good Lord
"It's got a spring on it like Arkwright's Till!" :D
this will be good when it happens, future looks bright
Storage has come on.
I remember spec'ing 100Gb storage in the early 90's for a Unix/Oracle install. It took up just two racks and replaced an entire room of old IBM storage. Only cost a million quid.
The first PC's I worked on professionally had 20Mb hard discs (pre- WIndows). I now have terabytes in the PC in front of me - and I don't even know how many without checking!
I distinctly remember my father telling me in the mid-1990s that his new laptop had a 1 Gb HDD and he wondered how he could ever possibly fill up that much space.
Still blows my mind how far we’ve come in the last 50 years. We would never have imagined the device I’m using right now. And we likely can’t imagine what we will be using in another 50 years.
Forward to today and that whole buildings contents can be stored on a 1tb SD card the size of a finger nail.
So funny like watching these old programmes laying out the future technologies- it’s like watching satire except it is true life only 40 odd years ago. Best times to be alive! Must look like a difficult and awkward world to today’s youngsters except of course those who lived it know it was just the opposite- simple, for we didn’t stress over what we didn’t have immediately at our fingertips. In today’s world, Take down the wi-fi connection for a few hours and all hell breaks loose 😂
1:38. There's a famous picture of Bill Gates and it shows just stacks of paper going up meters up a tree and he is in a harness showing a CD. The CD replacing ALL that paper and it's amazing that the CD and now thumb drives can replace thousands and even millions of pages that would have taken up an entire library.
If I magically teleport to 1982 and show them a 1TB hard drive they probably would go crazy with how much it stores maybe 1000000000 books? 😄
Well the computer revolution sadly didn’t started inthe 80’s as what they hoped for, but it started in the mid-90’s once internet become mainstream and windows 95 did made computers become more accessible to a more wider audience😁
Depends what you call "the computer revolution", I suppose. In the UK, at least, the 80s saw a fantastic period of growth, with dozens of affordable but completely different systems to play with. As a result, computer ownership was higher in the UK than anywhere else, and was arguably the world's most computer-literate nation for much of that time. Most of those systems didn't last beyond the 8-bit era of course, but by then they'd basically already spawned an entire British software (and particularly games) industry that continues today.
I do believe that modders use a similar method of receiving such a data transmission from removable media & can display images, or even video through a computer that can only display 8 bit graphics on its chipset.
The computer would act as an interactive menu system, & the video disc system will have it's own computer architecture which interfaces with the computer.
Effectively you are operating the disc player through the computer & the computer switches over to the computer part of the disc system & the transmission can be interrupted at will to switch back to the terminal.
Old & early demonstration of technology, can be understood more better, because at the time, no one knew any better!
4:49 wait… it’s called Byte because it means „by Eight?“
"And this floppy is twice as big, so it can hold twice as much"
aaaarrrgghhh!!!!!!!! :)
8-inch 75K floppy vs 5.25-inch 400K floppy!
We also had double density then dual sided 5.25’s shattering the 1MB ceiling for storage!
OCR baby...
Today we create more data in one millisecond than all the data that existed in 1982.
5:12: Nice 4k ROM. :P
My first PC had 6GB of storage. My friend lived near the National Coal Board accounts office , it was a huge 3 storey building and was where coal invoices for the whole of the U.K were dealt with using their massive computer. He worked out for that office to have the same storage capacity as my P.C, it would stretch from Wales to New York. He commented that I’d never need more than the 6Gb of storage I had.
So, did you have 6 GB or 6 Gb?
I thought for sure someone was going to yell, sssssh!
Never knew Benedict Cumberbatch was a time travelling nerd
Imagine showing them a 4TB SSD that is so cheap most people can afford it.
Meanwhile I have 2TB of storage on something as large as my thumbnail. Or 120TB on my home NAS.
The "one million bytes" bit. I downloaded this video, it's 238 million bytes...1600 floppy disks? (3&half inch)
Oh you sweet summer children. Now we can upload our documents to an A.I., talk to our PDF's, or have an A.I. do all the hard work for us. Those halcyon days; free from having to worry about the singularity, and getting to sit there and search a text console, narrowing down search parameters one at a time... they were good days, in their own special kind of way.
I still prefer print, but digital media is easier to lift!
It’s ironic to watch this on youtube with an ipad
A computer (with a 1MB of storage) was considered a solution that's looking for problems to solve. Amazing how far we have come so far :)
And now we have AI, a solution looking for problems to solve that we have yet to really find.
@@Nightweaver1 Indeed!