160 Gigabytes

[HeroHog]

Bah! You kids with yer punch card readers! When I worked at Tech we had analog computers that ya "programmed" with patch cords and the newer mainframes had wire-core memory! 

[HeroHog]

(OK, the analog units were used on some lab experiments and the mainframe with the wire-core memory was still in active inventory but it was there dangit!)

[Scout26]

I remember when I cam home from leave and bought a computer.  386x with a co-processor,  640K RAM, 1 m extended RAM, 500 meg hard drive, 5.25 and 3.5 in floppy drives and a tape back-up drive.  Color Monitor all for the screaming price of $1600 shipped.

[brimic]

I remember when I cam home from leave and bought a computer.  386x with a co-processor,  640K RAM, 1 m extended RAM, 500 meg hard drive, 5.25 and 3.5 in floppy drives and a tape back-up drive.  Color Monitor all for the screaming price of $1600 shipped.

I looked at something like that- at Radio shack. I was too poor to afford it at the time. 

[RevDisk]

As an FYI, Samsung should be releasing 16TB (15.3 real TB) SSDs this year, for enterprise customers. For around $7k. Which is fantastically cheap for enterprise.

It's actually not vaporware either. They have 'production' models made. It's just 48 layers of 3-bits-per-cell (TLC) 3D V-NAND, where 36 layers is standard now. So only a decent but not insane improvement. Most of your home SSD is air or plastic housing, btw. This is just cramming a whole bunch of semi normal components into a single unit.

[Marnoot]

You guys are adorable with your PC's.

LOAD "*",8,1

LOAD "*",1,1 if you needed to load it off of a tape. I remember Frogger taking 10-15 minutes to load off that dang tape. Eons to a 5-8 year old.

[Hutch]

(OK, the analog units were used on some lab experiments and the mainframe with the wire-core memory was still in active inventory but it was there dangit!)

I will call your core memory, and raise you.... carriage control tapes! (a paleo printer thing, for you kids).

[lee n. field]

I remember when I cam home from leave and bought a computer.  386x with a co-processor,  640K RAM, 1 m extended RAM, 500 meg hard drive, 5.25 and 3.5 in floppy drives and a tape back-up drive.  Color Monitor all for the screaming price of $1600 shipped.

I wonder if you misremember the specs.  My recollection was that when the 386sx was current, 40, 80 and 120mb drives were all the rage.  500mb would have been monstrously large in the early 90s.

[T.O.M.]

Reading all this made me remember my real first computer, a Smith Corona PWP5000 word processing unit. Bought it in 1990, heading to law school, knowing I would need to type papers and didn't want to run off to the computer lab at school alll the time.  It was a dedicated word processor,  with a 12 inch monochrome screen, and used 2.8" diskettes to store documents...no internal storage.  Basically, it was a typewriter with a screen and a disk drive, even used typewriter ribbons for printing.  Spent around $500 for the unit, plus an extra $75 for a paper feeder, from Service Merchandise store.  Didn't need anything else,  I had my Sega Genesis for entertainment.

[Marnoot]

I wonder if you misremember the specs.  My recollection was that when the 386sx was current, 40, 80 and 120mb drives were all the rage.  500mb would have been monstrously large in the early 90s.

Yep, our first PC was a 386sx with a 120 MB hard drive. I remember my dad griping about the fact that us kids' Wing Commander game was taking up 20-something MB.

[HeroHog]

I started with a IBM PC clone 8088 w/640k RAM, full height 10 MEG HD and a single 360k 5¼" Floppy drive, Amber Hercules monochrome graphics. As I advanced I upgraded it to an 8086 CPU, Math Coprocessor, 1,024k RAM, Seagate ST 225 20 Meg HD. At the time, I was large and in charge!

[HeroHog]

BTW: I got my PC to run Fortran and to do 3D CAD with CADKEY run off of a stack of floppies!

[Phyphor]

I remember my old 386 at a screaming 25Mhz....
Upgrading from an older ISA 8 bit card to a 16 bit (I.E, it had 1MB of RAM on it, IIRC, versus the whopping 256k the ATI card had on it, and it used both connectors on the motherboard, not just one like the ATI. ) made gaming quite a lot better.

Yeah, space was definitely at a premium.  100MBs may have seemed huge back then, but rapidly shrunk, especially when you installed games & compilers.

And yeah, I'd managed to forget the whole CONFIG.SYS & AUTOEXEC.BAT juggling one had to do for many games.  Some games wanted extended memory, others wanted purely conventional (first 640k), and others wanted expanded memory.

So, you had to load emm386.exe, himem.sys, your mouse driver (if the game needed it,) and your sound driver (if your soundcard needed it.  True Soundblasters generally didn't, but some other cards needed TSRs.... lots of fun fitting everything into memory,)

Don't even get me started on the bogusness of disk compression.  Stacker/Drivespace/etc sounded good on the surface....but turned out to be kinda crappy.

[HeroHog]

That's why I used a Perstor controller card to double my 40 to an 80!

http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Perstor/Perstor%20PS180-16F%20-%20Advertisement.pdf

[MillCreek]

It wasn't until the last move that I found and then threw out my 300 baud acoustic coupler that I used to connect to the Unix bulletin boards. you had to dial the number, wait for the beeps, and then wedge the phone handset into the rubber cups and it would connect. When I bought a 1200 baud internal modem for my Leading Edge Model D, I thought I was moving on up. My very first computer was a Texas Instruments 99/4a with a tape recorder drive. In chemistry school, I used an Apple II plus for my undergrad and grad to drive the GC/MS.

[birdman]

What's crazy is data volume.
So right now the best microSD a you can actually buy is like 200GB, and it's 11x15x1mm (165mm3), or about 1.25 GB/mm3, and about 400GB/g (and $0.5/GB)

That means a cubic meter of microSD cards (6.06 million of them) would:
1. cost $600 million
2. Mass approx 3 metric tons (6600lbs)
3. Hold 1.2 billion gigabytes.  That's 1200 petabytes. (1.2 exabytes)

Given that the human race has generated <10 zettabytes, that means that the entirety of the human race's information could be put into a cube less than 20 meters in a side, costing $6 trillion.

The -crazier- part is if you increased the volume to ~25 meter cube, you could have each card be accessed.
If done properly, you could probably access about 0.1% of them simultaneously, or about 60million at a time--at UHS speed, that's a read speed of about 3 petabytes/second (24000 Tbps), or a write speed of about 1/5th of that.

Meaning it's actually somewhat reasonable for us to build an information ark.
1/10th of the world GDP.
Have N-ary redundancy for control electronics (like 100-ary or more), with massive data redundancy
Powered by ultra-long-life RTG (again, redundancy) for backup
Encased in a thick-walled box with say...10-20m thick walls.

...and we have enough nuclear weapons to Orion-drive that f$&@er to another star.

[brimic]

What's crazy is data volume.
So right now the best microSD a you can actually buy is like 200GB, and it's 11x15x1mm (165mm3), or about 1.25 GB/mm3, and about 400GB/g (and $0.5/GB)

That means a cubic meter of microSD cards (6.06 million of them) would:
1. cost $600 million
2. Mass approx 3 metric tons (6600lbs)
3. Hold 1.2 billion gigabytes.  That's 1200 petabytes. (1.2 exabytes)

Given that the human race has generated <10 zettabytes, that means that the entirety of the human race's information could be put into a cube less than 20 meters in a side, costing $6 trillion.

The -crazier- part is if you increased the volume to ~25 meter cube, you could have each card be accessed.
If done properly, you could probably access about 0.1% of them simultaneously, or about 60million at a time--at UHS speed, that's a read speed of about 3 petabytes/second (24000 Tbps), or a write speed of about 1/5th of that.

Meaning it's actually somewhat reasonable for us to build an information ark.
1/10th of the world GDP.
Have N-ary redundancy for control electronics (like 100-ary or more), with massive data redundancy
Powered by ultra-long-life RTG (again, redundancy) for backup
Encased in a thick-walled box with say...10-20m thick walls.

...and we have enough nuclear weapons to Orion-drive that f$&@er to another star.

or wait 10 years and buy the thumb drive...

[KD5NRH]

Most of your home SSD is air or plastic housing, btw.

This is something I wondered about for a while with memory cards; long before MicroSD caught on, the actual guts of a regular SD were tiny compared to the package.  Always assumed it was some difficulty in addressing that kept them from simply stuffing 8+ sets of 16G card innards into a single card.  As it is, with 32G MicroSD retailing at WalMart under $20, around $10 online, and 128s even under $40 on eBay, it seems like some sort of RAIDed unit with a buttload of hot-swappable slots would be getting close to cost effective for expandable storage...if for no other reason than one could keep that ginormous music/video collection arranged across them to swap into the phone or tablet as desired.

(And yes, I do realize that such a collection would have to be truly epic to fill more than one 128G card when everything's downsampled to rates reasonable for a phone speaker or consumer grade Bluetooth A2DP connection.  I've got a few days worth of music and a couple hours of video not even half filling a 32G card right now.)

[MillCreek]

What's crazy is data volume.
So right now the best microSD a you can actually buy is like 200GB, and it's 11x15x1mm (165mm3), or about 1.25 GB/mm3, and about 400GB/g (and $0.5/GB)

That means a cubic meter of microSD cards (6.06 million of them) would:
1. cost $600 million
2. Mass approx 3 metric tons (6600lbs)
3. Hold 1.2 billion gigabytes.  That's 1200 petabytes. (1.2 exabytes)

Given that the human race has generated <10 zettabytes, that means that the entirety of the human race's information could be put into a cube less than 20 meters in a side, costing $6 trillion.

The -crazier- part is if you increased the volume to ~25 meter cube, you could have each card be accessed.
If done properly, you could probably access about 0.1% of them simultaneously, or about 60million at a time--at UHS speed, that's a read speed of about 3 petabytes/second (24000 Tbps), or a write speed of about 1/5th of that.

Meaning it's actually somewhat reasonable for us to build an information ark.
1/10th of the world GDP.
Have N-ary redundancy for control electronics (like 100-ary or more), with massive data redundancy
Powered by ultra-long-life RTG (again, redundancy) for backup
Encased in a thick-walled box with say...10-20m thick walls.

...and we have enough nuclear weapons to Orion-drive that f$&@er to another star.

Star Trek: TNG did this in the episode 'The Inner Light'.

[Ben]

Leave it to Birdman to do the math! 

Thanks - that was interesting, especially the cost. I wonder what those $ numbers will be in five years?

A 512gb micro SD was supposed to be out last year, but I did a quick search and didn't see it for sale anywhere. Projected price was around $1000.

http://www.androidcentral.com/theres-512gb-microsd-card-coming-july-you-likely-cant-afford-it

[AJ Dual]

What's crazy is data volume.
So right now the best microSD a you can actually buy is like 200GB, and it's 11x15x1mm (165mm3), or about 1.25 GB/mm3, and about 400GB/g (and $0.5/GB)

That means a cubic meter of microSD cards (6.06 million of them) would:
1. cost $600 million
2. Mass approx 3 metric tons (6600lbs)
3. Hold 1.2 billion gigabytes.  That's 1200 petabytes. (1.2 exabytes)

Given that the human race has generated <10 zettabytes, that means that the entirety of the human race's information could be put into a cube less than 20 meters in a side, costing $6 trillion.

The -crazier- part is if you increased the volume to ~25 meter cube, you could have each card be accessed.
If done properly, you could probably access about 0.1% of them simultaneously, or about 60million at a time--at UHS speed, that's a read speed of about 3 petabytes/second (24000 Tbps), or a write speed of about 1/5th of that.

Meaning it's actually somewhat reasonable for us to build an information ark.
1/10th of the world GDP.
Have N-ary redundancy for control electronics (like 100-ary or more), with massive data redundancy
Powered by ultra-long-life RTG (again, redundancy) for backup
Encased in a thick-walled box with say...10-20m thick walls.

...and we have enough nuclear weapons to Orion-drive that f$&@er to another star.

And we should fill it with Insane Clown Posse "Miracles", Rebecca Black "Friday", a backup of 4Chan, and cat memes, and all the dick pics from Tinder.

For some reason, I've been stuck on what NASA would be like if Deadpool were in charge of it.

[RevDisk]

Re the 16TB SSDs I mentioned earlier?

768TB in a 2U chassis. 2 million iops. 16PB per rack, with 42 million iops. Probably for only $10 million per rack.

For non-geeks, to put this in perspective, Wikipedia is 12GB compressed. 70GB for the pictures. Let's call it a 100GB. You could keep 160,000 copies of wikipedia on hand.
Google's entire index is only 200TB. For $10m, you could keep 80 copies of Google around.
You'd only need 5 of these to store all the uploaded Youtube videoes per year.

At SSD speeds.  653,594,771 SSDs, at $7000. $4,575,163,398,692 all of humanity's data at SSD speed. Still pretty expensive, and ignoring ancillary costs like housing, network, etc.


Now if you didn't care about speed or compactness, there's the BackBlaze Storage Pod 5.0.   $7,974 per 180TB, or $0.044/GB

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/cloud-storage-hardware/

55,555,556 pods to store 10ZB  * $7974 = $443,000,003,544. A paltry $443 billion dollars to store all of humanity's information. And all you'd need to do is network them. Or more likely, store only the indexes online and keep the pods themselves sealed up and offline. So for half a trillion dollars, you could get a turnkey system with everything you needed, storage side. At 1/12 the price of MicroSD or SSD!

[KD5NRH]

For non-geeks, to put this in perspective, Wikipedia is 12GB compressed. 70GB for the pictures. Let's call it a 100GB. You could keep 160,000 copies of wikipedia on hand.

If I had won the Powerball, putting Wikipedia on paper tape was one possible misuse of the money.

I'd probably make it back in admission to see the damn thing, though.  $1 to get in, $5 for a pic inside the warehouse, etc.

Of course, getting Jimmy Wales a razor was also on the list.  Some guys should never do the stubble look.

[mtnbkr]

Re the 16TB SSDs I mentioned earlier?

768TB in a 2U chassis. 2 million iops.

That'll run Splunk nicely. :D

Chris

[Scout26]

I wonder if you misremember the specs.  My recollection was that when the 386sx was current, 40, 80 and 120mb drives were all the rage.  500mb would have been monstrously large in the early 90s.

I'll have to go down to the basement and look.  It's still there....