@stux
Small floppy 👀 Wild how much information we can store in tiny things now.

@stux
What year would this have been?

@stux I remember those days.

@stux Witchcraft!

@stux
This is what it looked like when I started as a computer operator in 1985. These machines ran a whole bank even with so little storage

@stux I recommend the British TV show "Look Around You", which is a satire of these types of shows.

@stux I used hard disks much like that in my first job in the mid 80s. They made very satisfying mechanical clunk noises and stored a huge 100Mb or so...

@stux For me a trip down memory lane ;) I worked with all those technologies. Back in the day, the boot sequence of an IBM 360 mainframe was on an 8 inch floppy. Mind boggling.

@stux I remember the excitement around laserdiscs. A few years later after that programme we had a BBC Master at school connected to a laserdisc player with the Britannica Encyclopaedia - around about 1990. An amazing time!

@stux @IngridHbn Been there, done that. 😜🤓 And above all: that’s not so long ago.

@stux Feeling old now because I lived through that era as a (young) computer user ...

@stux Recall a storage array we had late 90s, EMC, ..it was a 1TB capacity (500g mirrored)...it was the size of 2 full sized server racks about and the cost was just insane.

@stux I did love that 64K Commodore a lot.

@stux Fast forward around a decade later and I dreamed of owning a 50mb hard drive for my Atari ST. Salty it was out of my reach at around £350 but I dreamt of the disk swapping I could say goodbye to. Sigh.

@stux BBC Micro's were the bane of my childhood at school. Used to static shock me every time you turn the monitor on.

The "video disc" became Laserdisc and didnt take off as by the time it got to market it was too expensive and VHS was most prominent option beating out Betamax and the lesser known Philips C-Max in the UK, VCD/SVCDs never took off either.

@stux This is so great. Please note how he says "Bang - Bang!" while putting the hard disc into the reading machine... 🤣😅

@stux I've somewhere seen Alan Kay providing video material with a "persistant memory" in a mercury-filled glass tube storing bits of information for about 4 seconds consuming insane amounts of energy and the scientists freaked out.

Today we smile about the lousy Qubit successes scientists celebrate.

@stux I have a horrible feeling I watched that when it originally aired.

@stux 😁 I have been there and done that !

@stux I want everything in this video, that enormous swappable hard disk 😍

@stux @Pierrette “We were so much younger then. We’re older than that now.”

@stux my brain is damaged from watching too much Monty Python, I was just waiting for the sketch to become silly in some way.

@stux I watched this expecting a Monty Python parody until quite late in the video. Oh wait, sometimes old timey British media clips are serious!

@stux I remember this at the time...

@stux

Happened within my lifetime, and I'm only 55y 🤯

@stux This was the tv “programme” that got me on the right path to computers that i kept reading about. I have also got the book, from which I learned the basics of well.. BASIC. It was such a revelation what a FOR NEXT loop actually does. Am I old or what. #TheComputerProgramme

@stux Yep, used that. And that, and similar to that. Acorn Atoms, occasionally, BBC micros a few times, ICL 1900 machines (mainframes) when I started work.

Used cassette tape to store on, floppies were a radical new idea.

@stux brilliant!
My first computer that I was coding on had 64K RAM, upgrading to 2M RAM a few years later was massive upgrade :-)

@stux we live in science fiction.

I just wish the writers were better...

@stux now i feel old...i remember watching this, must of been five..

@stux
Thirty plus years ago I worked for a company in NZ called Databank which basically processed all banks data work plus payrolls etc. The computer room was huge, took up half the building, the rest of which was we data entry women & a couple of offices. How times have changed but good memories.

#TIL why it's called hard DISK 😅
@stux

@stux how about the fact you could snort a terabyte up your nose with a microsd card !

@stux I remember that at the time. Was quite enlightening then, too. Although: "Small floppy" – bless. He's nostalgic for 8".

@stux Pressing the spacebar still does the same (in web browsers at least)

@stux I worked at the BBC Interactive Television Unit in 1989. I bet my colleagues there set up this demo 5 years earlier

@stux this makes me feel old. I grew up with an Acorn BBC Micro (model b, as per this machine with it's 32k memory). Its funny to think how much tech has shrunk in all my tims using computers.
This was my only experience of a laserdisc with the BBC (master in this case). I think we either had one or somehow was loaned one at High School.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project

@stux @nolwennm Wow I just love how you could load the hard drives.

@stux You can find a whole bunch of these programmes on the Computer Literacy Project archive site: https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/

@stux I was around at the time as a kid and very into computers. One thing that always strikes me about these videos is how they really didn't realise how fast technology was about to advance.

This video would have been mid-80s, I think. The BBC Micro was sold between 1981 and 1994. If this was 1985, say, then it's only 10 years away from an internet enabled Windows 95 PC with a CD-ROM drive!

@stux I love the moment when his voice strains while saying 'And this disk will hold about...' and lifting that disk stack :D

@stux Oh well, this reminds me of the first harddisk i bought for my Z80 CP/M Computer. Had 10 Megabytes, was an 8” model and cost around 5K D-Mark. Was in 1978 and i now feel very old.

@stux "you could actually fit the whole of the encyclopedia of Britanica on this disk!" 😆

@stux 1982
It was a very good year 😂

@stux Reminds me, I really need to reassemble this Master! The rest of it is around here somewhere, though no laserdiscs, unfortunately.

@stux @vampiress We are a *long* way in the future.

@stux @KevinMarks ah yes … the “horse and buggy days” of … the 80s ….
Pardon me, I need to moisturize my ancient mummified carcass.

@stux
Ah, the good old days. One thing you didn't want to hear was a disk crash when the heads touched the spinning disks and gouged their way in. Ear-splitting!

@stux @Vaguery
The shorter fellow who did most of the talking was Ian McNaught-Davis. I knew him well, used to work with him. Great raconteur. Thanks for the memory!

@stux "but the breakthrough is going to come with this" *pulls out 1TB micro SD card*

@stux I constantly think about the fact that I use more cpu cycles to encrypt and decrypt a single web page than we did to send multiple trips to the moon.

There's more computing power in my phone than in the entire building of my elementary school when I was young.

There's more digital storage in my office right now than most nation states had for much of the 90s (put together, for most of that time).

@stux I love the “it looks like magnetic tape in the form of a flat gramophone record.” The early days for sure.

@stux I interned at the lottery company GTech in the mid-90s and one of the first things they had me doing was swapping disc platters just like those.

@stux @bigzaphod They use “of course” a lot more than I'm comfortable with in that video...

@stux see also https://youtu.be/pQHX-SjgQvQ?si=KlKWFgLLOhyu0sen

@stux https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cCJh5D0FCZk

@stux

Technology has come a very long way since the mid 1980's when floppy disks were the home user option and hard drives were mega expensive.

The first IBM PC I used has a 5 Megabyte hard drive and that was a luxury 🙂🤷‍♂️

@stux In the mid-90s, I managed/maintained a couple of British Rail radio telephone call logging machines running Unix. The storage was removable Winchester drives like the video, except they were around 12" thick and weighed a ton! The best bit, however, was booting them up from punched paper tape every time they crashed, which was approximately twice a week! 😳

@stux I love the amount of effort and skill that was put into telling that story. Plus, the use of physical space as part of the storytelling.

Yet, I wish I could go back in time and show them a microSD card, an iPhone, and Wikipedia. (and my hope is that in 40 years, someone might be joking of doing that for our current tech generation… as opposed to society collapsing and leaving us without any such technological innovation)

@stux A BBC Micro! I still have mine :-)

@stux Do you happen to know the year of this video? :)

@stux so many nostalgic "feels" (as the kids say these days! 🧙🏻‍♂️)

"No we don't!" 🤣

@stux @kevinctofel I could listen to Mac all day. So many happy memories from the 80s.

@stux went off to find the original.

1982!

https://clp.bbcrewind.co.uk/e2b5dd518bb6fca385dbc4368148bdc1

@stux Ah good old days. Chris Searle & Ian MacNaught-Davis. This brings back some good memories of watching these two as a child.

@stux The sound of that keyboard.... takes me back.

@stux Awww, Mac and Chris Serle. I think this was from the earlier “Making the Most of the Micro” series. I remember watching “Micro Live” which followed after. #bbc #bbcmicro

@stux Makes me feel old....like, "Press Play on tape"-old 🤣

@stux The way this has got me so immensely awed, grateful and slightly ashamed of the thousands of papers and books saved in my computer alone.

Brb, reading them all this weekend!

@stux I want one of those mainframe "platter" hard drives, just to have on my shelf. A whole million bytes of data!

@stux cassette tape book is cute though 🥰

@stux In my long career in IT I met several people who started out with paper tape.

One of those people started work at Bletchley Park. He would be flabbergasted that you could have a terabyte of data at all. Storing it on a chip smaller than your little fingernail would have blown his mind.

@stux I used to watch that programme.

@stux oh my, I totally agree, I definitely appreciate how far technology has come since then. Just... These frickin' huge monsters of storage devices of I'm not quite sure what capacity, and today we have micro SD cards with 256 GB and more

But also I think it's kinda cute how they go about explaining the relative size of data storage. They really tried to make it relatable for people in a time when home computers were still the exception (if I'm not totally off lol)

@stux Fascinating! I am wondering though, as they were measuring disk space with number of characters, wasn't there and text compression back then?

@stux funny thing that for me, the BBC microcomputer we see at the beginning and the end where for me the latest and greatest technology. It kept me awake at night. And I send this message from a much more compact and millions times more powerful device that is going to be 3 years old soon…

@stux

If you liked this then you might enjoy a slightly later BBC series called "Welcome to my World" which covered the many then possible future impacts (mostly negative) from IT and computerisation.

Most of those predictions have come to be more than accurate 🫤

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtTC86oLsoND8lOfQgQmtsK-qVC4zMTLQ&si=6A-1PwZi4M5qNxzu

#BBC #WelcomeToMyWorld #IT #Cyber #Futureology #Documetary

@stux filed under "I feel old"

@stux my first computer was an i386 with 128mb hard drive. On that we had the OS, WordPerfect, some drawing software, and about 600 hours of games including Doom, Red Baron, several Lucas/sierra adventures etc.
Now a game is 120gb and nobody has to think about efficiency 😔

@stux I had a BBC Micro (with cassette drive) as a kid, and it also blows _my_ mind as to how far we've come.

@stux My mom often remind me that her first hard drive was 256Mb sized and that it was pretty big at the moment. Early 90' I think (not quite sure).

@stux Take a listen to this podcast and then look up the Doomsday project from 1986. They wanted to record a snapshot of the UK that year and did it on Laser disc. Unfortunately the hardware to read those discs is hard to find these days..

https://pca.st/711ul976

@stux so this phone has about 40 times greater storage than that optical disk. Albeit 4 decades ago.