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How big is big?Dec 09 '99 Write an essay on this topic.Our family has been involved with computers for over 20 years now. We started off with the first computer which had a base cost of under $100.00. Now that little TS1000 has a eye popping 4k of Ram which was expandable to 16k! You plugged it into your T.V. Memory back up was a tape drive! Yip, you plugged your tape recorder in it, slapped a blank 30min or 60min tape in and stored your information this way. About 75k was the max storage you could squeeze onto a single side (of course this was multiple programs stored on a tape. You just fast forwarded to the number counter on your tape recorder to get to the program you wanted to retrieve!) BTW, this was the first personal computer which had the capabilities of 1meg of Ram! Then we hit the big leauges and purchased a CoCo3! Wow, what a jump in both price and memory! For $3,500.00 we ended up with a computer with a killing 512k. Memory back up was with a 5 1/4" Floppy Drive. As memory recalls, it was around 120k which was stored on a single disk. This was the first Multi-Tasking Computer! I fed it with 8 programs once. Unfortunatly, after the 3rd program (an 8 bit game), the grade of the output was very degraded. On the 6th, 7th & 8th game, they ended out to be stick men. That is until you exited from previous games. Then the O.S. re-built the programs to their original form. The point here is the computer maintained the original status of the program after it would degrade the program to save on internal memory! Quite ingeneous if you ask me. On to the C64. This was Commodore's toy which exploded the computer market! Fun, but a royal pain to program. I always dispised this O.S. This computer had the first HDD (Hard Disk Drive). A whopping 10Megs of storage! If you had the killing bucks ($1,000.00), you could install an external HDD of 20Megs! These drives were MFM's, a real arcaic storage system. Who would need anything more? On to the future and the World of Amiga! I have owned 14 of these baby's and to this date, the best O.S. I have ever seen! One time I had 3 of these computers linked together to drive between 7 SCSI HDD's! The 3 computer's were A500, A2000 & A3000TT. The storage system here was a monsterous 10Gigs of Drive space to store my world on! With 10Gigs, who would ever need anything more?... Well poor marketing, and pirates killed the most wonderful operating system ever created. On to the late 90's. Where every bonehead wants to use this world's most wonderful educational tool as a toy! Yes, a game machine. Where you now require copious amounts of wasted storage space just to save a CDRom crammed full of video images, which just bog down the CPU, and is nothing but an utter waste of your Ram! But this is why the Clonies won in the long run. So, today, you are forced fed to have a computer system with foolish amounts of storage, with huge amounts of Ram and CPU's that can warm an average size room in the winter here in Canada, just to "get by" playing a simple game, where you know you'll have your ass whipped within 10 minutes of play! To sum up, if you want to waste your life playing a simple game, then yes, you will need extreem amounts of storage. Storage in excess of 10Gigs if you want to keep up with the "Coolest, Fastest Games on the Planet". If you are like me, a rare entity in our populus, and can find time better put educating yourself on a computer, well then I will recomend 6 - 10 Gigs of storage. This is only due to the enormous file sizes that we have become accustomed with. Processor speed is another thing. You could get by with a 200MHz Pentium. But then again it realy boils down to how much money you wish to dump out. This week I heard on CBC Radio that there is a company that has sucessfully completed a 750MHz Pentium III chip (not Intel!). I will leave you with these final thoughts though... You know the Intel commercial for the Nasdaq? The one where "By the turn of the Century we'll be able to process 2 billion bits per second" or something along this line... Well let me be the first to tell you that Intel had acomplished this well before this commercial ever aired! They are SPOON FEEDING you! This is how one becomes the best at what they do! And they do it Great! The best in the world in fact! They have processors on the blocks which will process over 2 billion bits per second! But they are just content making you re-buy you chips one step at a time (8MHz - 16MHz - 32MHz - 66MHz - 75MHz - 100MHz - 120MHz - 133MHz - 166MHz - 200MHz - 233MHz - 266MHz - 300MHz - 333MHz - 400MHz - 450MHz - 500MHz - 750MHz (Duh,... Don't you see a pattern here YET!)) Storage space runs the same way too! It runs parralell to the User's Demand (and stupidity, mine included I have purchased 19 computers! And over $20,000 of PLASTIC to boot!) Top drives are 16Gigs, and I'm sure there is a 24Gig out there somewhere in Computerland. The most unfortunate thing with computers is what you see on any computer shelf is TOTALLY OBSOLITE! This is because there is a company out there producing the next generation of Computer! Faster, Larger, and Cheaper! They do this all for you. Right?  |
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