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Ensign Expendable posted:I remember when I bought my first digital camera, it came with a whopping 16 MB memory card. The first digital camera I used didn't have a memory card. You slid a floppy into it and it saved pictures on that.
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Nov 25, 2014 05:56
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RC and Moon Pie posted:The first digital camera I used didn't have a memory card. You slid a floppy into it and it saved pictures on that. One of these?  We had one of these at my second real job and I thought if was the coolest thing ever.
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Nov 25, 2014 06:38
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Oh yeah, well in my last year of high school I used Dropbox. wait
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Nov 25, 2014 06:40
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I was in high school during that weird fuzzy period between floppies (though our computers still had the ports) and flash drives, so we had to write everything to CDs.
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Nov 25, 2014 06:42
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Coffee And Pie posted:I was in high school during that weird fuzzy period between floppies (though our computers still had the ports) and flash drives, so we had to write everything to CDs. I had a home computer with an internal Zip drive and a separate floppy drive. A friend with one of those SuperDisk drives that was 120MB but backwards compatible with 1.44MB floppies. I was jealous because clearly, clearly that was the future of storage.
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Nov 25, 2014 06:59
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I wonder what the people from Blossum are up to now.
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Nov 25, 2014 07:01
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RandomPauI posted:I wonder what the people from Blossum are up to now. Well Blossom I think is semi-regular on the Big Bang Theory and Joey turned into a wax figure and made an amazingly lame sitcom with Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I think Anthony returned to being an alcoholic?
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Nov 25, 2014 08:28
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tribbledirigible posted:10", you young whippersnapper. Your memory is going, old man, they were 8" floppies. I've got a box still in the closet from when I had the PDP-11.
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Nov 25, 2014 08:34
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Aleph Null posted:One of these? I believe it was that exact model. This was the first digital camera I owned, the Polaroid Fun Flash 640.   From a PC Mag review of it: quote:The number of shots taken—not the number remaining—displays on the control panel; the 2MB of built-in memory can save up to 18 images. There was a feature to let it take a smaller-sized image, but it was aggravating to set. The review also brags on the image quality. If there was so much as a breeze, the picture looked horrendous. Speaking of demos, I think it had to be a demo of Crystal Caliburn pinball that I got for the Mac as I sure don't remember anyone buying it. It was awesome.  AOL sent a different type of demo once, via MAD Magazine. AOL bundled with a sampler of greatest hits: It's a Gas, Barely Alive, Green Jelly's Blind Date. I still have that one.
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Nov 25, 2014 09:20
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RC and Moon Pie posted:I believe it was that exact model. gently caress Polaroid's digital cameras, gently caress them and may they burn in hell. I had the PDC2020, used the crummy SmartMedia Card format. The image quality is what I could only describe as grainy balls covered in baby diarrhea. I paid $200 in 2003 for that thing. It had a horrible interpolated mode that increased its resolution which made everything much, much worse.
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Nov 25, 2014 12:15
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My first own digital camera was actually a cellphone camera on the Siemens S55. It was an additional component that snapped into the bottom port and actually had a flash, a feature missing from many other phones from then on out. Picture quality was surprisingly decent, but storage space was limited as hell(a whole 1MB) I got the phone and a bunch of accessories for cheap off eBay in late 2003, and it was quite amazing for its time: Triband, color screen, MIDI ringtones, Bluetooth and IR, Java apps, e-mail, GPRS data connectivity, and a serial data cable to synchronize your contacts and calendar with Outlook, battery life of over a week. Still one of the best phones I ever owned.
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Nov 25, 2014 12:32
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Smoke posted:battery life of over a week. How I miss not having to charge my phone every other day.
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Nov 25, 2014 14:23
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Aristophanes posted:This is less 'obsolescence' and more marvelling at the progress of technology. In my first year of high school we had to have a USB flash drive, and I bought a 1GB drive for about $25. Today, I just got a 16GB USB 3.0 flash drive for a little under $10. I remember at school in about 1998/1999 our computer teacher telling us about ridiculously expensive RAM was and how criminals, at least in the UK, would break into offices and just rip the RAM out of computers. He even showed us a video about this! This site seems to tell you the price of memory through the years. I think my teacher was a bit out of date as the price for 1998 hovers between $1-3/MB but in the 80s it was $150-$8000/MB. Its $0.0085/MB now. That's 117 times cheaper than $1/MB.
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Nov 25, 2014 15:30
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Coffee And Pie posted:I was in high school during that weird fuzzy period between floppies (though our computers still had the ports) and flash drives, so we had to write everything to CDs. That was college for me. 2000-2004. My school had a "laptop program", so every incoming student had to either buy a laptop from the school or bring one that met the specs,. Most bought from the school, which were Thinkpads (I think my incoming class had T20s? it was back when IBM still owned the brand.) They had a floppy drive, but it was a unit that was "hot swap-able" with the CD drive. Technically. These things ran Windows 98, so "hot swapping" was a misnomer. You always had to make sure to go into the control panel and tell it to eject the drive, and then, and only then, could you remove the CD drive and put in the floppy. And even then it would still sometimes freeze up, or not recognize the drive. It was pretty much always best to save whatever you were doing and shutdown to swap it. By about my sophomore year, most people's floppy drives stopped working, but it was still too soon for flash drives to be a "thing" (I remember seeing ads for them in things like TigerDirect, and it would be like $40 for a 10MB drive, and no guarantee it would work on any computer you plugged it into, so you'd have to also have a floppy or CD drive wit the drivers, etc...) For the most part, we'd email our assignments to the professor or TA, but I was an engineering student, so sometimes I've had a large collection of (sometimes very large) files for a project that was too big to email. The laptops they provided us with only had CD drives, not CD-R drives, so the solution was either store them on your shared network drive and use one of the computers in the computer lab to burn it to a CD, or go out and buy your own external CD-R drive. I chose the latter, since I lived off-campus. But man, that thing was FLAKY. It came with the worlds shortest USB cable, like less than a foot, and warned to NEVER use a cable extender or USB hub. And since these were oh-so-modern laptops, they also had a whopping 1 USB port, and no PS/2 mouse port (though they did have a PS/2 keyboard port, for some reason.) They also only had a nipple/clit mouse, which I hate, which I guess makes me weird her in goon-land, as all I ever see are praises for clit-mice. Mine started "drifting" tot he right within the first few months I had it.
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Nov 25, 2014 15:45
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DrBouvenstein posted:It came with the worlds shortest USB cable Some of them still do  I bought a swank LaCie multi-burner for my netbook earlier this year and the cable they packaged with it is less than 6" long.
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Nov 25, 2014 15:55
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duckmaster posted:I remember at school in about 1998/1999 our computer teacher telling us about ridiculously expensive RAM was and how criminals, at least in the UK, would break into offices and just rip the RAM out of computers. He even showed us a video about this! My first computer had 5MB RAM after I upgraded it. It was just enough for Windows 3.11 and AOL. I eventually got Windows NT 4 on there before I scrapped it. I also got Windows 95 on there when it came out, but had to transfer CAB files from my parent's computer spanned over two floppies apiece, which took a long loving time. Man, even typing MB seems wrong. My phone has 400 times the RAM of my first computer. SLOSifl has a new favorite as of 16:02 on Nov 25, 2014 |
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Nov 25, 2014 15:58
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This discussion on prices finally explains those parts of Neuromancer where stealing RAM was a big deal.
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Nov 25, 2014 16:07
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Wasn't there a big settlement earlier this year that was the result of a class-action lawsuit alleging price-gouging by RAM manufacturers? 
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Nov 25, 2014 16:11
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duckmaster posted:I remember at school in about 1998/1999 our computer teacher telling us about ridiculously expensive RAM was and how criminals, at least in the UK, would break into offices and just rip the RAM out of computers. He even showed us a video about this! I remember in 1996 rushing out of school (literally cutting class) because there was a sale on sale on 8 MB EDO RAM for $8/MB. As I recall there was some massive fire at a plant in Singapore or something like that which caused a shortage in the late 90s.
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Nov 25, 2014 16:26
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Antifreeze Head posted:I remember in 1996 rushing out of school (literally cutting class) because there was a sale on sale on 8 MB EDO RAM for $8/MB. Yeah I totally remember taking advantage of some "sale" and spending I think like $200 to put 24 megs of RAM in my Pentium 200. Ran the gently caress out of things though! Earlier this week, I spent maybe $80 total to bring my main ESX server up to 32 gigs. 
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Nov 25, 2014 18:39
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duckmaster posted:I remember at school in about 1998/1999 our computer teacher telling us about ridiculously expensive RAM was and how criminals, at least in the UK, would break into offices and just rip the RAM out of computers. He even showed us a video about this! Chip theft at HP Germany (in German; translated by Google).
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Nov 25, 2014 18:44
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Antifreeze Head posted:I remember in 1996 rushing out of school (literally cutting class) because there was a sale on sale on 8 MB EDO RAM for $8/MB. There was a boom and bust in that timeframe. The computer market in '94 was huge and everyone expected the same demand in '95 so there was a lot of inventory produced, especially because Windows 95 was coming out. The market was actually softer than expected, but the clone manufacturers were stockpiling RAM in anticipation of sales that didn't happen, so them buying up much of the supply kept prices high. This in turn made the RAM producers invest in more fabrication capacity, eventually producing even more RAM when the demand wasn't really there. And then Sumitomo in Japan, which produced some big fraction of the resins used in RAM fabrication, blew up, so prices spiked. http://articles.latimes.com/1993-07-05/business/fi-10241_1_epoxy-resin But then once the piipeline filled up everyone realized there was too much RAM for demand and price wars began and prices bottomed. Intel, Compaq, etc. dumped their stockpiles and by mid-1996 everything was really cheap. I remember spending $450 for 16 megabytes. Yeesh.
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Nov 25, 2014 18:59
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My first RAM upgrade was from 2 to 4MB in my 486SX.. It cost about $200 in 1992 or therabouts.
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Nov 25, 2014 19:25
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DrBouvenstein posted:That was college for me. 2000-2004. That generation of thinkpad has a base station deal that adds extra ports. I just threw one out yesterday. Best laptops from the win 98 era were those Sony VIAO 505's that were small as gently caress. I had one and it weighed maybe 1 pound and was less than half an inch thick. It was so small that to plug it into a modem you had to use a pop out port because the body of the computer was too thin to have one. El Estrago Bonito has a new favorite as of 19:39 on Nov 25, 2014 |
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Nov 25, 2014 19:35
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My parents made the excellent decision to buy a Mac as our first family computer ca. 1995. Roughly £1500 for a Power Macintosh Performa 5200/75 LC with 500 MB HDD, 8MB RAM and a blistering fast 75 MHz CPU. I spent over a month's wages as a Childhood trauma if you ask me. old bean factory has a new favorite as of 21:47 on Nov 25, 2014 |
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Nov 25, 2014 21:39
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Collateral Damage posted:My first RAM upgrade was from 2 to 4MB in my 486SX.. It cost about $200 in 1992 or therabouts. Mine was an 8 kilobyte expansion cartridge for the VIC-20 and it cost about the same in the early 80s.
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Nov 25, 2014 22:24
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duckmaster posted:I remember at school in about 1998/1999 our computer teacher telling us about ridiculously expensive RAM was and how criminals, at least in the UK, would break into offices and just rip the RAM out of computers. He even showed us a video about this! 1991 I was a junior programmer and got into work early one day to find the front door of of the office building had been sledgehammered down, and about 100 desktop Pcs had been torn open and 4MB of memory removed from each. About £13000 in memory in total, plus most of the monitors had been smashed at they'd been thrown onto the floor. Amazingly the thieves were caught and at trial their defence was that we'd contracted them in to repair the memory and thats why the Pcs were opened like that. Needless to say our IT manager didn't agree with the story when giving evidence.
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Nov 25, 2014 22:51
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Gromit posted:Mine was an 8 kilobyte expansion cartridge for the VIC-20 and it cost about the same in the early 80s. Well, you easily trumped what I was about to post :P I'm sure every Amiga 500 owner remembers paying about $100 for the pretty much mandatory 512kb expansion card. Lol, this website http://www.vesalia.de/e_a500ramexp.htm is still charging 30 euro for them.
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Nov 25, 2014 23:04
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Baconroll posted:Amazingly the thieves were caught and at trial their defence was that we'd contracted them in to repair the memory and thats why the Pcs were opened like that. Needless to say our IT manager didn't agree with the story when giving evidence. ... You have to hand it to them, that takes some serious balls.
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Nov 26, 2014 03:02
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El Estrago Bonito posted:That generation of thinkpad has a base station deal that adds extra ports. I just threw one out yesterday. Best laptops from the win 98 era were those Sony VIAO 505's that were small as gently caress. I had one and it weighed maybe 1 pound and was less than half an inch thick. It was so small that to plug it into a modem you had to use a pop out port because the body of the computer was too thin to have one. I do corporate moves, and I see a LOT of those around. They security dock in with a key for places like health clinics and such, and have 6 extra USB ports, VGA monitor, printer port and battery backup. They actually make a lot of sense for those kinds of places.
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Nov 26, 2014 03:22
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My high school storage format was a usb zip 250 drive, which at the time actually was probably about the best portable storage you could get. Way bigger than a floppy, didn't require extra power cords or a CD burner. I felt like I was ahead of the curve for once there, and the drive and discs still work to this day. I liked zip and never really had the click problems. Maybe the 250s were better constructed or something.
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Nov 26, 2014 09:07
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mng posted:How I miss not having to charge my phone every other day. If they gave me a phone that was like a regular smartphone but the battery was an inch thick, I would buy every one they made.
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Nov 26, 2014 09:38
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Gromit posted:Mine was an 8 kilobyte expansion cartridge for the VIC-20 and it cost about the same in the early 80s. In ten years people will talk about gigabytes like this. future me posted:LOL in 2014 I paid $60 for six gigabytes of memory, just upgraded ten exabytes for twenty bucks #memory #RAM #future #rememberWW3thatwasfun
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Nov 26, 2014 11:36
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MondayHotDog posted:In my first year of high school we were still using floppies. There was still a diskette dispenser in my college when I entered it. USB drives were getting pretty common by then and people were turning in their reports and all on burned disks. I remember a poor sod using one of the diskettes from the dispenser and losing all her coursework.
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Nov 26, 2014 11:52
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Caedus posted:
Every generation of ThinkPads has a dock, though for some ultraportable models it could be standard. Like my X32 came with one I think, as it didn't have a cd drive built in. I'm now typing this on a T520 plugged into a dock, which was optional and totally awesome. Even in a regular corporate office it's great to be able to quickly secure the laptop and have it connect to the bigass monitor, ethernet and all the other crap. I hope docks don't become obsolete technology. Speaking of ultraportables, I used to have one of Compaq M300 that I bought refurbished while in college. Mine had XGA resolution which on an 11" screen was pretty nice and the performance with Windows 2000 was decent as well. Also I definitely recall people using floppies early on too.
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Nov 26, 2014 15:29
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IndustrialApe posted:There was still a diskette dispenser in my college when I entered it. USB drives were getting pretty common by then and people were turning in their reports and all on burned disks. Yeah, those were the cheapest, nastiest diskettes you could find. I had a few get stuck in the drive because the sliding metal guard thing deformed.
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Nov 26, 2014 15:36
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mobby_6kl posted:I hope docks don't become obsolete technology. I don't think this will happen until laptops themselves are rendered obsolete. They're far too useful in corporate/office settings to go away, and I'm sure they're a highly profitable accessory for OEMs. Before I had an office job I didn't think they were worth having but when you routinely connect your laptop at the same place every day they're indispensable.
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Nov 26, 2014 16:10
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Geoj posted:I don't think this will happen until laptops themselves are rendered obsolete. They're far too useful in corporate/office settings to go away, and I'm sure they're a highly profitable accessory for OEMs. Before I had an office job I didn't think they were worth having but when you routinely connect your laptop at the same place every day they're indispensable. Or until everything works wirelessly.
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Nov 26, 2014 16:59
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Ensign Expendable posted:Yeah, those were the cheapest, nastiest diskettes you could find. I had a few get stuck in the drive because the sliding metal guard thing deformed. 3½″ floppy quality went to poo poo in the twilight years. They were worthless for anything but sneakernet.
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Nov 26, 2014 18:47
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duckmaster posted:In ten years people will talk about gigabytes like this. Look at this glorb, still using hashtags. %grandpa %obamatron4000 %kony
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Nov 26, 2014 19:10
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