My Daily Thoughts

SuperboardII

How Far We Have Come

If anything, there's a reverse Moore's Law observable in software: As processors become faster and memory becomes cheaper, software becomes correspondingly slower and more bloated, using up all available resources.
Jaron Lanier

I still have the first computer I ever bought.  I keep it frame on my wall as a reminder of much things change.

The computer was an Ohio Scientific Superboard II

I was a 1 Mhz CPU with 8K of memory.  It was connected to a television via UHF and used a tape recorder to store programs. The screen resolution was 24×24 characters

My kids have never seen or used a cassette tape before.

I took the picture of the computer with my phone.  The file is 978.  I could store 1/245 of the picture on the old computer.

On the other hand, the computer that flew a spaceship (Voyager) outside our solar system had 69k of memory.  (Scientific American) and 81,000 operations per second. The 6502 processor in my superboard did 430,000 instructions per second, but only had 8K of memory.  Source

My Samsung phone on the other hand does roughly 200 billion operations per second.

Writing this makes me excited to see what is coming next.

Live the Adventure

Geoff

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