I have a relative who started working for Texas Instruments in the early 80s. He told me on his first day there, he was issued a personal “disk” about the size of a large pizza. If memory serves, he said its capacity was either 1 GB or maybe 100 MB. Which at that time was huge.
In the mid-90s, I bought a laptop with a 1 GB hard drive, which was both exotic and expensive at the time. It’s amazing how technology has advanced so quickly.
@MikeInNH. I wish automobiles had advanced like things in the computer world. I punched thousands of cards. I could punch a drum card that fit around a little drum on the keypunch and when data cards were punched, the keypunch would automatically shift from character mode to numeric and automatically space to another field. It seems to me that 80 characters could be punched on a card.
As to power consumed by the computer, there were stories about ENIAC, the computer at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947, that would cause the lights to dim in Pennsylvania when it was powered up and brought online.
In the 80’s a 1gb drive was the size of a large washing machine. If it was the size of a pizza box it’s more like 20mb.
What makes you think autombiles haven’t? Tech growth in cars is not quite as fast as the much younger tech of computers, but cars have more computing power in their radios than the entire Apollo capsules had. My first car was totally analog. My newest car is mostly digital depending on how you measure it.
Well, if we are into computer nostalgia, I remember seeing a 128 bit (yes, 128 bit) RAM at Northern Michigan University that was the size of a medium bedroom. It was made up of small toroidal rings with three wires, vertical, horizontal and diagonal, running through each of them. The computer used punch cards and tape drive memory and the only thing it did was address envelopes using a chain drive printer.
I also recall the 500kb drum drive the size of a beer keg that was used in the A6A attack aircraft. It had to be hauled up to the cockpit by hand on the narrow ladder the crew used to enter and exit the plane. Not fun. In the late 80’s, the disk drives we used in the shop were 14" diameter 10 MB drives, the platters were $150 each but had been out of production for several years before the Navy approved their use.
FYI, the processor that is used in the F35 is the same processor (P6) that Steve Jobs was going to use for the next generation Mac’s but decided on Intel instead. The computerized test set that we were using that had those 14" drives took up two standard racks and had the power of an IBM PCjr. The Navy approved replacing it with a VAX 11870 in the day that VAX announced that the 11870 would not be produced any more.
But back on the subject, there is a company that makes body panels, the unibody section, and subframes for those old Mustangs. Most if not all the suspension pieces are still available. Power Nation used that company to build a 67 (or 68) Mustang from the ground up, no original factory parts or junkyard parts. Looked like a new one except they modified it for racing.
@Mustangman. When I was in 6th grade back in 1953, I thought by the time I grew up and was ready to buy a car, cars would be powered by atomic energy. There were nuclear power plants to generate electricity, so why not have nuclear powered automobiles.
I remember an old Jack Benny show on the radio. Jack was going to trade in his Maxwell. The salesman described in very technical terms one feature of the new car. After the salesman went through all the technical jargon about this feature, Rochester asked what all this technology did. The salesman replied, “It empties the ashtray”.
I know the audio system in today’s car has advanced over the A.M. radio in my 1947 Pontiac. The computer controlled fuel injection and ignition is a big advancement over the carburetor and distributor with its mechanical ignition points and centrifugal and vacuum spark advance.
Now I will have to admit that some features are irrelevant to me. For instance, the interior lights on my Sienna dim slowly when I close the door. My strippo 1965 Rambler 550 didn’t even have door switches to turn on the dome light and that didn’t bother me. I don’t need headlights that turn themselves on automatically. I do think the hybrid vehicles are a real advancement.
When I think about the research I was doing as a graduate student, we got two runs a day on the mainframe computer. If we had our job submitted before 8:00 a.m. we would get it back by 4:00 p.m. If we submitted our job before 4:00 p.m. we would get it back at 8:00 a.m. I was certainly more efficient on desktop personal computer where I could run an even larger jobs in less than a minute. Instead of building bigger and bigger mainframes, faster and more efficient personal computers and software were developed. The industry looked at the big picture of computing.
I think we need to look at the big picture of transportation. I need a minivan to transport my musician friends and their instruments, but when I am not going to gigs, it’s wasteful for just me to run errands in the minivan. However, it’s not economically feasible for me to license and insure a smaller second vehicle.
In some cities, there are motorized scooters people can check out. Just as the world has gone from big mainframes to personal computing, maybe we need to think big in the transportation business and think seriously about personal transportation.
Back about 25 years ago someone in OK City advertised a computer for sale in a trade paper that was sold at convenience stores and which I followed religiously for cars and parts. It was an IBM that used punch cards if I remember correctly.
They wanted 2500 dollars for it with the flat bed trailer included. My gut feeling was the trailer was 2500 and the computer was free…
It sounds like the one purchased by a local university back when I was in high school. I used to work in the maintenance dept during the summers. One day they called everyone in to unload one of those behemoths. It took everyone to wrestle it (two sections) off the trailer and through a floor and wall which had been knocked out so the computer could be lowered into the climate controlled basement.
Seems they could have found a better place to install it. Odds are it was scrapped not many years later.
And unfortunately that compute power is 1000 less powerful then my laptop. The programming isn’t that sophisticated. However the programming for autonomous vehicles is very cutting edge.
But I do agree tech advancements in cars has increased drastically just in the past few decades, but still not on pace with computers.
I saw the result of a spinning drum that broke off it’s perch and went flying through a cinder-block wall. Luckily no one was in it’s path.
You mean the Vax 11/780.
Bringing it back to cars. For years - dec Vax systems were the primary systems used by the auto and aircraft industry Cad systems.
In the “good old days” of cars, there were things that some regarded as inconveniences but didn’t bother me. I didn’t have any problem stepping on the floor pedal to operate the starter on my 1947 Pontiac or 1950 Chevrolet pickup truck. I didn’t have any problems operating the hand choke. Even not having a trip odometer didn’t bother me. My insurance agent gave me a little plastic device that clipped on the sun visor. I could set the mileage indicated on the odometer on the numbered wheels on the device and calculate the distance I traveled by subtracting that value from the new reading on the odometer.
However, there are all kinds of things in the ‘good old days’ of computers that would certainly be a major inconvenience today. The turn around time when we shared time on a mainframe was a real problem. I had committed myself to a paper presentation at a conference. I had run the results through a computer program I had written and had run the program in chunks. In writing up my paper, I saw results that were wrong. I went back through the program and found I had made an error. I bribed the night operator to run the whole job. She started the job at 8:00 p.m. At 1:30 a.m. she called me and said the job had executed successfully. At 3:30 a.m. she called me and said the printer had printed my job. I drove to campus and threw a snowball at the window of the machine room. She opened the window and tossed me my printout. I raced home and went right to work correcting my paper. Today, I could have used a well tested commercial statistics package and run the job and printed it out on my home computer in less than half an hour.
When I think about the ‘good old days’ of automobiles, I think of the brands that dropped out of the market in my lifetime-Nash, Studebaker, Hudson, Packard, Kaiser, to name just a few. I’ll bet more computer manufacturers have left the scene–Conrtrol Data, DEC,.Prime, RCA, Osborne, AT&T, for example. I’ll.bet as many computer manufacturers have gone under as car companies
My brother restored a 1954 Buick and made the 120 trip to my house and back to show it off. He covered the distance in about the same time as a modern car. I couldn’t run a job on yesterday’s computing equipment and it would take many times longer than today’s computers.
It’s been a while so I suppose so.
Many years ago but still relevant , Truck Box manufacturer’s drive picks up brand new F600 from Dealer and Checks Oil, doesn’t close hood all the way , gets on the highway and up to speed , goes over a bump and the hood opens up smashing the windshield , cop calls for a tow truck, tow truck backs into the front end of the truck smashing the front end. All of this within 5 miles of the dealers lot !
Same Company
Driver with a full load of custom made Plexiglas conveyer systems ,worth like 4X the value of the truck, less than 1/8 mile from the Plant Driver gets T-boned by a Cement Truck . Truck is Destroyed , 90% of the Plexiglas parts are in bits and pieces . Customer has to wait about 6 weeks for the shipment to be remade.
nossa que pena que aconteceu isso com o mustang zerinho.
Mentioning 5 Vax’s and a Ferrari in the same sentence led me to conclude that a Vax was some kind of upscale car (by Vauxhall?). Did a search and mostly got vacuum cleaners and computer equipment. So I see Vax’s are some kind of computer. Never heard of them. Learn something new every day.
@Dakotaboy. The VAX computers came along in the early to mid 1980s and were manufactured by Digital Equipment Company (DEC). I ran many jobs on a VAX system. However, I’ve never driven a Ferrari.
Apparently he said, wow what a pity that happened with the zero mustang.
Back in the early 80’s to about 2005 they were the most popular 32bit mid computer of it’s time. Made by Digital equipment company. At the time the second largest computer company in the world. Then bought by Compaq and then Compaq was bought by HP.