Vintage Computing

[Slim]

As I mentioned in another thread recently, I'm a hoarder. I was leafing through my accumulation of old computer mags today and came across this gem of an advert for a business computer.

Decent spec for the time (1983). And as you can see it cost £3995, which back then would have bought you a brand new small car. About £14000 in today's money according to the inflation calculator at https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/monetary-policy/inflation/inflation-calculator.

My eye was drawn to this double page ad especially because it's described as a "price / performance breakthrough".

Today you could buy yourself a Raspberry Pi for £15, add a 32GB micro-SD card for £7 and you'd have a system that would obliterate the Sirius in every measurable way - hundreds of times faster, 2000 times the RAM, 1600 times the storage. Note that the hard drive access time (218ms) is listed as a selling point. On a £7 SD card that's less than 2ms, but even on modern conventional spinning disk it's about 10ms.

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[Thenop]

256 kB RAM!

[Slim]

256 kB RAM!

That was a lot back then - just checked and the Apple IIe which came out the same year had 64k. Cheaper of course. The Sirius was a serious business machine.

[Slim]

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The Sinclair Microdrive. Takes cartridges that can store up to 50 files! And you can start transferring them in a mere 3.5 seconds. Cost: about £170 in 2025 terms. The image in this post is 84k, so it would just about fit on the cartridge. You could transfer it to your computer in about 15 seconds.

[The Picnic Wasp]

How could all this happen in 40 years? It's so much more than I can comprehend and I'm envious of those who have a command of coding etc. We just now need to crack the travelling at the speed of light situation.

[Thenop]

How could all this happen in 40 years? It's so much more than I can comprehend and I'm envious of those who have a command of coding etc. We just now need to crack the travelling at the speed of light situation.

No need to know how to code. We have AI generated models that do it for us. For me anyway, I don not know how to code and I seem to get by quite easily.

I thought we cracked the speed of light  theory? We know what happens. I am not looking forward how our species, being the ignorant, inbred apes we are, roam the known universe and wreak havoc.

[Slim]

How could all this happen in 40 years? It's so much more than I can comprehend and I'm envious of those who have a command of coding etc. We just now need to crack the travelling at the speed of light situation.

Every now and then there are massive breakthroughs in the technology underpinning computing - the transistor was a huge one, then semiconductors.

I wouldn't say that, despite the progress made, there's been a singular breakthrough like that since the '80s. There've been minor ones like SSD superseding HDD of course, though they haven't made them obsolete. It's really just the development of the same technology from infancy to maturity that's driven the dramatic change we've seen in performance and cost of manufacturing.

But - there is a long-standing conspiracy theory that aliens gave us the "microchip".

[The Picnic Wasp]

How could all this happen in 40 years? It's so much more than I can comprehend and I'm envious of those who have a command of coding etc. We just now need to crack the travelling at the speed of light situation.

No need to know how to code. We have AI generated models that do it for us. For me anyway, I don not know how to code and I seem to get by quite easily.

I thought we cracked the speed of light  theory? We know what happens. I am not looking forward how our species, being the ignorant, inbred apes we are, roam the known universe and wreak havoc.

How could all this happen in 40 years? It's so much more than I can comprehend and I'm envious of those who have a command of coding etc. We just now need to crack the travelling at the speed of light situation.

No need to know how to code. We have AI generated models that do it for us. For me anyway, I don not know how to code and I seem to get by quite easily.

I thought we cracked the speed of light  theory? We know what happens. I am not looking forward how our species, being the ignorant, inbred apes we are, roam the known universe and wreak havoc.

I get the AI being able to unravel and problem solve for us. Calculators did that for us in the 70s. It's more the confidence in the subject gained from having studied the science close-up and in depth I was driving at.

I get by in the computer world. I know enough to gain enjoyment from it by pottering about in Logic and that sort of thing. I have many friends who would be completely baffled by the prospect of putting music together in a laptop. AI can do it for them now, but where's the achievement and satisfaction in that?

 I suppose I have quite an enquiring mind, so when I'm up against something I don't understand I do have a sense of envy, or admiration for those comfortable in a subject.

Also, for all of mankind's countless faults, I still feel a sense of disappointment that we will probably never be able to reach for survival as a species on some distant, habitable world and that we will all be gone with so many unanswered questions. So near and yet so far.

[Slim]

Here's an ad for specialist graphics hardware upgrade, intended to provide 512x512 graphics. The 1.5 million pixels per second figure sounds impressive even now somehow, but a bit of research tells me that the GPU in my present desktop PC is capable of more than 100 billion pixels / second.

Also note the 64 colour spec. A run-of-the-mill NVIDIA GPU will do more than 16 million colours even if your eyes can't tell the difference between them all.

Even so that Apple II card would have been a big upgrade. Probably aimed at universities, small engineering firms maybe. The standard Apple II did 280x192 graphics, with 6 colours.

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[R6GYY]

I had one of them there Sinclair Microdrives 

[Slim]

There's a fascinating item in the 'Newsprint' section in this same mag from September 1983, in which Guy Kewney argues that "Concurrent CP/M-86 is the most important operating system, apart from Lisa, to appear on micros". He refers to it as "real-time" but really he means "multitasking", not quite the same thing.

I've snapped the conclusion from his piece here. Quite interesting partly because he mentions Bill Gates, but for me mostly because history has been rather unkind (brutal really) to his point of view. MS-DOS and its successors came to dominate the market while the various flavours of CP/M sank into obscurity. He was certainly right about multitasking going on to be a big thing though.

Some may recall the incident in 2006 in which, due to a mixup at the BBC, a man waiting to be interviewed for a job was interviewed on live television in place of Kewney.

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[Slim]

In the '70s and for some time into the '80s, adverts aimed generally at men often featured photogenic young women, frequently in minimal attire. Ads for clothes, cars, musical instruments and bathroom products often did this and as you can see from this example from June 1985, even computer storage vendors had a go from time to time.

I don't think my 8" would be floppy around this young lady for very long!

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[Slim]

£2047 for a 640K PC with no hard drive (about £6400 in 2025 money). But what really gets me is the price of the keyboard .. £185! In modern terms, abut £580

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[Thenop]

I misread the ad, thought it said:

please phone your nearest bank.

I suppose with those prices..

[Slim]

A piece from the March 1981 issue of Personal Computer World. I particularly like that the new 5.25" hard drives are described as "fantastically small mass storage devices".

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This is one of the fantastically small storage devices, a Seagate ST-412, introduced that year. It had a 10MB capacity and weighed about 4.5kg:

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I wonder how the author of the piece would have reacted if you could have told him that within his lifetime (I like to think he's still alive anyway), you'd be able to get 100,000 times the capacity from a thin sliver the size of a little fingernail weighing 0.25 grams?

Fun maths: if you were to cram the physical space that the Seagate occupies full of 1TB micro-SD cards, you'd have about 19 petabytes of capacity. Enough to store all the films in the history of cinema in high definition, several times over. You could get about two seconds of high-definition video on the Seagate.

The Seagate's capacity cost, adjusting for inflation, about £350 per MB. So on that basis a single 1TB micro-SD card would give you about £300,000,000 worth of storage.