[Coco] Interesting new essay by Marty Goodman on computers

[Arthur Flexser]

...which touches on the CoCo in the latter part.

Art

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 20 Sep 2007 19:25:52 -0700
From: martygoodman <martygoodman at sbcglobal.net>
To:  <@sbcglobal.net:@unspecified-domain>
Subject: Computers, then and now (a serious essay by Marty Goodman)

Today I bought a Staples special: An external USB hard drive, capacity 400 GB.
The drive is made by Western Digital, tho the case and interface are by some
third party ("Elements").  I paid just a bit under $110 including tax, and have
registered on the internet for the $45 rebate associated with this item.

[Note that Staples says they'll sell and rebate up to 10 per customer.  
However, in my area, all of the local Staples were sold out of this item for the
last several days, and today just ONE happened to find ONE of this item.]

In any case, upon receipt of my rebate (and Staples has been very good in the
past about eventually sending out its rebates) I will have purchased an external
400 GB drive for $65.

That's 16 1/4 cents per gigabyte of storage.

This is Sept 2007.

It was back in the early 1980's, about 25 years ago, that I bought my first hard
drive for my IBM PC.  With the MFM controller card that was included in the
package I bought at a local computer swap meet, this 10 megabyte "half height" 5
1/4 in form factor hard drive cost me $125.  Note that this was a USED system,
whereas the 400 GB drive I just bought was new, in box, guaranteed, and from a
major local retailer.  However, I'll ignore that (which, if factored in, would
only make what follows MORE dramatic).


Let's compare these two purchased of mine, separated by a quarter of century, to
look at how the cost of hard drive memory has changed.

I said above this purchase was for memory at 16.25 cents per gigabyte.  Divide
by 1,000 and you we get .01625 cents per megabyte.  Or a bit less than 2 one
hundredths of a cent per megabyte for storeage, today.

The first hard drive I bought was $100 for 10 megabytes, or $10 per megabyte.  
Or 10,000 cents per megabyte.

Compare .01625 cents to 1000 cents ($10).  Result: IN MY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE,
over the course of the last quarter century, the price of hard drive storeage
has fallen by a factor of more than 50,000.  That's right.  Hard drive memory
today costs 1/50,000th as much per megabyte as it did 25 years ago.

I might add that a given individual hard drive in use today typically holds 150
to 200 gigabytes of data, and individual drives with capacities around 1
terrabyte (1000 gigabytes) I believe are currently available (if not, they very
very soon will be, for a while back I saw drives with 700 gigabyye capacities).
Back then, typical drives were 5 to 10 megabytes.

Thus, the capacity of an AVERAGE CURRENTLY IN USE individual physical hard drive
has, over the last quarter of a century, by a factor of 10,000 or more.

It's not at all clear to me this trend is going to level off any time soon.

By the way, similar things have happened with RAM memory (system memory).

I bought my first RAM chips to upgrade a 16K Radio Shack Color Computer from 16K
to 64K bytes of memory.  At that time, the price of 64K by 1 dynamic RAM chips
(4164 chips, if anyone remembers them) had just droped to a hair below $10 per
chip.

This was 1982.  Again, a quarter of a century ago. The cost of memory then, thus
was $80 for 64K bytes of memory (each chip was 1 bit wide, so you needed 8 chips
for 64K bytes).  That's $1280 for a megabyte of memory.

A few months ago, back now in late 2007, I bought 2 gigabytes of DDR RAM memory
for $120.  That's 3 cents per megabyte.  Meaning a megabyte of system RAM memory
today costs 1/25,000 th as much as it did 25 years ago.  Or one could put it
"RAM memory today is 25,000 times less expensive than it was 25 years ago."

Of cousre, we could look at processor speeds.  Here, the first computer I owned,
25 years ago, a Radio Shack Color Computer, based around a Motorola 6809, had a
processor speed just under 1 megahertz.  Today's processors are humming along at
3000 megahertz and more.  But wait!  My old Color Computer processor moved data
in chunks one byte wide.  Today's computers move data in chunks 32 or even, in
some cases, 64 bytes wide.  Meaning each cycle can effectively get 4 or 8 times
as much done.  Meaning the EFFECTIVE processor speed of today's computers is
roughly 12,000 to 32,000 times that of the first home computer I owned.  And
this isn't even factoring in the fact that today's computers have other hardware
to do all sorts of things, ultra fast, that the old computers had to do
laboriously slowly using software.

On the other hand, software for todays machines has gotten slow and bloated even
FASTER than todays machines have gotten speedy:  My old Color Computer took
about 1/2 second to boot up.  My current Windoze XP machine takes a minute or
more.  My old Color Computer could reformat a text document FASTER than does
Word for Windows today (tho of course the "Telewriter" word processor I was
using on the Color Computer didn't offer but a tiny fraction of what Word can
boast in features... tho it DID provide all I needed to write articles, essays,
etc.

That Radio Shack Color Computer wasn't the first computer I used... or even
programmed.  No.  Back in high school, in 1965, 66, and 67 I did some
programming on an IBM 7090 and IBM 7094 main frame in Fortran Assembly Language.  
I don't recall the specs on those computers.  But I DO recall that my high
school BOUGHT its OWN computer... one of the first two in all of the NY City
public high school system to do so... back around 1966, and I had fun
programming it in assembly language to print out text-graphics of a strip-tease.  
THAT computer was a "Monrobot XI 2000".  It boasted 2000 bytes of system memory,
in the form of locations on a rotating drum.  Its memory operation cycle time
was nominally 11 milliseconds per operation, for that was the rotation time for
the drum.  That translates to a speed of a bit under 100 Hz for memory access
cycles.  Tho I managed to speed up my assembly language programs by knowing
WHERE on the DRUM memory locations were, and arranging to access memory 1/3 of
the way around the drum from the previous location, thereby speeding memory
access to 3 locations per revolution, or by a factor of 3 (for it turned out the
thing COULD grab memory after a third of the rotation was completed).

SO I can, in my own experience, compare programming computers I used and
programmed over the course of the last 40 years.  I find that a bit scarey.  
But the results of that comparison I find quite interesting.  I hope you found
it interesting, too.

---marty