 |
| ...and yet they're the same size! Freaky! |
.
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Relics.
The one on the left was under some stuff on the corner of the desk. Ironically, the one on the right was atop the same stack of detritus.
The one on the left is at least ten years old. I'm pretty sure it was in the Nikon Coolpix 990 when I got it from Oleg. Lotta good times have been crammed into those sixteen tiny megabytes over the years...
.
.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
40 comments:
Oh god yes. S. and I went to NZ recently, and we brought a digital camera that takes SD cards, and I bought microSD cards with adapters. 64 GB of storage, on a little rectangle of polycarbonate plastic and silicon the size and thickness of my pinky fingernail.
What a fascinating modern world we live in. :)
http://everyoneisstupidbutme.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/8-inch-floppy.jpg
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tablet_Rimush_Louvre_AO5476.jpg
I've seen 8" floppies. Put it back in your pants.
...As for the next link, Tam, I've seen them, too. ::Insert baked-clay pun here::
We still use the little cf cards to load software into machine tools. They only have an OS capable of detecting a 2k card-yes, 2k not 2m- which, for ladder or offset data might as well be 64tb
My first digicam, a Polaroid, took Compact Flash cards. I think it came with an 8 MB. I was so excited when I got a 128MB card for it, then, about 11 years ago, threw down the $40 for a 1 gig card. Tall cotton.
But seeing as how that "little"* point-and-shoot could only break 2 megapixels if you turned it to highest-resolution, lowest-compression, on a bright day, it wasn't like I was filling up a lot of cards with it anyway.
The other day, I finally threw away some 5.25 floppies that I hadn't looked at in 15 years.
My current love is high-density, small USB flashdrives. I can't believe that we ever used anything else. The promotional give-away one in my shirt pocket right now could hold more than the hard drive on the machine that I first installed Windows '95 on.
*Smaller than a Canon AE-1, maybe.
Interestingly, CF is so established in digital photography that while Canon and Nikon have moved their consumer-grade DSLRs to SD cards, their top-of-the-line professional stuff still uses CF, I guess for backwards-compatibility for professional photogs who are invested in the medium.
Useta be that cf was faster too, though i imagine that gap has probably closed up some. I have a pcmcia cf adapter, a cf/sd adapter, and an sd/micro sd adapter. They all work great.
Many years ago we got two new IBM XT computers in our office, one had a 5MB hard drive in it, the other a 10MB. My program manager and I argued for hours over who needed the larger hard drive the most - I eventually won. Three years later we replaced those machines. I had managed to use 6 of the 10MB in my machine. My program manager had only filled up 2.5 of the 5MB in his.
What are these "hard drives" you speak of?
My first computer was an IBM PC jr. It had no hard drive and took the 51/4" floppy disks.
Later, 40 MB hard drives were huge. Now I have programs bigger than that.
Yes, children, I rode dinosaurs to school.
Joseph,
"My first computer was an IBM PC jr."
n00b
;)
I thought I was something special when I bought my 340MB microdrive.
Despite its age and barely over 4MP, the camera that uses CF still takes the best pictures, especially close-ups.
My first PC didn't have a hard drive OR a floppy
It used cassette tapes
Ya know.... That thing before cd
Make sure you back up your stuff on those.
I've a couple years worth of pics on one I may lose because now it asks to format when inserted into the reader.
My fault for being slack about offloading them.
Solid-state memory for cameras?
Hah!
Who here remembers the Sony Mavica, which used 1.44 Mb 3.5 floppies?
rickn8or,
That was my first digicam! :)
I was shocked last month when my Mohs surgeon used a Mavica to take pictures of my face and wound. I haven't seen one in almost a decade, and wasn't entirely sure I was really seeing one actually being used in this day and age (!) until I heard that disc drive whir, and asked about it.
Tam and Rickn8or,
I still have one. I still have 3.5 floppies for it, and it works!
My favorite ride was Triceratops. It was a smooth ride for a four legged tank. :)
When wife and I were into the off reading scene some friends of ours had a Mavica.
Missed some good action shots waiting on the thing to store out the last shot.
I held on to the Mavica long after it was obsolescent, one the presumption that "Well, maybe you can't hold a lot of pics on a floppy, but you'll always be able to transfer your photos, since the 3.5" diskette is an established format and it seems like computers will always have them..."
*glances at new PC*
Er, yeah...
My first computer was beads on a string...
get offa my lawn!
My first computer was a guy with glasses called Mervin. 'Course back then glass hadn't been invented yet, so the frames were empty. When we upgraded to Merv 2.0, he got a pair of pince-nez and this was the first Windows OS. All ya had to do was punch the numbers in and Merv would give you an answer. If he caught a virus and started running slow, you just punched a bit harder...
Rickn8or: double hah! I bought one of those Sony floppy-disk Mavicas a couple of months ago at a thrift shop. Two bucks. I may be stupid, but I'm also cheap. (Wait, that didn't come out right ....) The Mavicas that write to those 8-cm CDs are still too expensive.
True about CF cards in the higher-end Nikons, but Nikon replaced one of the CF slots in the D4 with the Sony XQD card for mysterious reasons. Still, at nearly 6k USD for a D4 body it's not likely to become a problem for me.
My dad was very happy when he bought our first home computer, the TRS-80. He spent the extra $200 or so to upgrade from 4k to 16k RAM. But that meant we had to wait to afford the floppy disk drive, so we used the cassette tape drive for quite some time.
Secret code: 98 buypita. Perhaps that is a sign to creep out of the office and get some dinner.
Moore's Law in one picture... :-)
Roberta:
Actually, my first storage medium was a roll of paper tape. 10" floppies were kinda newfangled.
110 baud baby!
Larry - Beads! You had beads? We only had knots.
Anyone still use (or remember ) Zip disks?
I've got a parallel port Zip drive and a stack of disks around somewhere, but none of my laptops have parallel ports anymore.
Mike_C, thanks for shattering my dreams. My retirement plans revolved around my Mavica making a substantial contribution to the final total.
I am still running a parallel port connected HP Laserjet 6P printer. Since laptops stopped being equipped with parallel ports a l-o-n-g time ago, I found a Hawken Technologies Wireless 802.1 G Print Server (HWPS12UG) that has two USB and one parallel port. Now my HP printer is a device accessible by any device via wireless, instead of connected directly to any computer. When that printer eventually dies, I can use a USB connected printer via the same wireless print server.
I remember working with a piece of equipment thirty years ago that had a pair of Shugart 8" floppy disc drives with failing bearings. The high speed screeching from that beast was unbearable.
An Allosaurus is my favorite ride. Not too good at cornering, but in a straight line....
Make that Hawking Technology, not Hawken Technologies. I was having a "relic" moment.
"Anyone still use (or remember ) Zip disks?"
Just earlier this year I shut down my 1997 vintage Pentium II Dell with an in the chassis Zip drive.
That 100 MB was a LOT of storage back then.
Tam and Og: I believe CF has, or at least had, one other major advantage over SD and its descendants: the original CF specification allowed a HUGE maximum capacity. In practice, this meant that any camera that uses CF cards could read any card that is compliant with the original CF spec, so you didn't have to spend three grand on a new camera just to use a bigger card. I could plug either that 16MB card or that 16GB card into my D200 digital camera, and it would work. This is not the case with SD -- a camera made to the SD spec cannot use SDHC data cards.
Anon @ 9:02: I still have a 250MB internal Zip drive and a large stack of both 100MB and 250MB disks for it. Hardly ever use 'em anymore, except when hunting for ancient files. The same computer also still has a 3.5" diskette drive in it.
Many moons ago, the PC and Mac techs were arguing about which was the superior OS, with the lone Amiga guy razzing them both. They asked my opinion, having been at that job since the building was put up.
Sez I, "I grew up with mainframes. If it ain't water-cooled, it ain't a real computer." Nobody asks my opinion anymore.
Oh, and we were too poor to afford a dino to ride. I walked... oh, you know the rest.
stay safe
My first computer was an HP25 calculator with 49 instruction lines and probably less than 4k of ram, that had to be reprogrammed if you turned it off. I thought I was in heaven, because before that I used a slide rule.
Ed, I'm still running my HP 4L that was NIB from Fry's when I made my escape from California in '93. Of course, the cost of toner cartridges makes me flinch.
Guess I'm younger than most of you; I didn't have a dinosaur to play with, but remember dodging the odd hostile Cherokee whilst coming and going from grade school.
Since I've switched to shooting RAW/NEF + JPG in my Nikon D200, I've been thinking the 16Gb CF cards are too small for a typical photo outing. I can only imagine what you'd need to keep a new D800 with 1x CF and 1x SD slot happy. With the slower speed of the SD, maybe a middling-size CF that transfers images to a larger SD card?
One neat thing about CF (besides the fact that Nikon keeps it for their pro-level cameras) is that UDMA CF cards act behave perfectly as hard drives for computers. I've run desktop machines completely on 8gb and 16gb CF cards under Windows XP, and also set up CF cards as Pagefile drives on other machines under XP/Vista/7 to boost their performance. While not quite as fast as a dedicated SSD, they're not bad!
My first one was a Commodore Vic-20 I bought at a flea market. Got it home, hooked it up to the TV, turned it on and it said "ready" with a blinking cursor. Here's how far down I was on the learning curve...
I typed "hello" and hit return. It said "syntax error".
I thought, damn thing doesn't work.
I first started many years ago on an 8088 with a 3/4 inch tape drive and a 5.5 floppy.
Boot from floppy, put in tape drive control disc to access the tape drive. Once it was loaded put the DOS disc back in tell computer to load the program from the tape drive. Wait for it to load the program, which you had to know the exact track it was on, on the tape. go outside smoke a cigarette, come back in, talk to the other guys in the class. Go to the bathroom, stop at the drinking fountain, go back into class. Maybe the program was finally loaded, maybe you had a syntax error and had to start over. 30 minutes of a 50 minute class goe, just trying to load the program you are supposed to be learning about.
lergnom said: Sez I, "I grew up with mainframes. If it ain't water-cooled, it ain't a real computer." Nobody asks my opinion anymore.
So, lots of custom PCs, and the later/higher-end G5 Mac towers?
(Though I'm not sure if today's mainframes are water cooled...)
Post a Comment