Yea, well my not so new desktop has many times the data storage and
processing power than the IBM 360 that I learned to program Fortran IV
on in 1975.
In 1993 I worked on a project for AT&T a terabyte of Data was a huge
deal back then, and we were accessing a couple of terabytes. To save
AT&T money we changed the database schema from having a 14 digit
alphanumeric "customer number" in every record to having a 10 digit
hexadecimal number with the customer number being present in only one
master record. This saved millions of dollars in data storage space and
justified the cost of reprogramming every module, (just about everything
in fact), that relied upon a customer number. Today I have a couple of
terabytes of data storage in my desktop and I'm contemplating a couple
more, the drives only cost about $100.00 US each.
On 3/5/2010 2:40 PM, Bob W wrote:
---- John Coyle<[email protected]> wrote:
On a side note, I heard yesterday that, in the '80's, a
university in
Europe transmitted an 863GB file over a 16800km link in
just over 1000 seconds!
That must have been the sum of all data held on all computers
at the time.
It would certainly have occupied a lot of space. In the early 80s I worked
for an international brewinng company where we had an ICL installation very
much like this one:
http://pink-mouse-productions.com/icl/2900.htm
Note the size and capacity of the disk packs - 200mb on a thing the size of
a washing machine. You'd need 4315 of them to store 863 Gb. Even if the data
was stored on tape you'd need an enormous number of decks - you certainly
wouldn't be able to swap the tapes quickly enough to transmit at that speed.
We had about 20 of them to run an sizable business iirc. Today in my phone I
have a micro SD card, smaller than my smallest fingernail, which has 80x the
capacity of each of those disk packs.
--
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New;}}
\viewkind4\uc1\pard\f0\fs20 I've just upgraded to Thunderbird 3.0 and the
interface subtly weird.\par
}
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