[PLUG] Terabyte paper tape

Ben Koenig techkoenig at protonmail.com
Thu Sep 23 01:07:22 UTC 2021


People talk about old tech they same way they talk about fast food.

Gone are the days when a burger would be eaten with both hands. A bygone era when a man would stand by the quality of his work, truly committed to quality.

We live in an era when technology is shrunken and diminished. With a single hand we grasp a shortlived device designed to be used and discarded as quickly as the box it came in.

The computers of my generation are gimped, handicapped machines made to exist as a node in an infinite network of communication protocols. What was once a puzzle is now a debate, and arguments have replaced conversations.

On paper, I work with computers every day. But in reality 90% of my time is spent proving who is responsible for a bad Customer Experience.

It would be nice to spend some time in a room filled with analog devices and paper storage media. The same tech used to split the atom and visit the moon..

After the testing I recently did on some Macbook M1 laptops going back to punch cards sounds like an amazing idea.

-Ben
Sent from ProtonMail mobile

-------- Original Message --------
On Sep 22, 2021, 5:36 PM, John Sechrest wrote:

> I remember that the first task in a new computer installation was to get
> the manuals set up. We often had 5-8 ft of Manuals that came with a system.
> So upboxing the manuals and setting them into binders was almost as big a
> task as getting the computer set up.
>
> They used to build reference manuals and Users guides with the full
> expectations you could find what you needed, since there was no network and
> every good manual page read was one less support call.
>
> On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 5:33 PM Tomas Kuchta <tomas.kuchta.lists at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> You did not miss much.
>>
>> The old tech sucked. I was (un) fortunate enough to experience it, both at
>> home and work.
>>
>> About the only good thing about it was its simplicity and openness. Most of
>> the ancient computers came with awesome manuals for both HW and SW. It was
>> so easy to learn and understand. I guess, that the same could be said about
>> today's tech albeit at different abstraction level.
>>
>> -Tomas
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 22, 2021, 11:34 Atharva Lele <itsatharva at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> > Hello,
>> >
>> > Reading all of this is really so interesting to me! I was born in 1998
>> and
>> > I feel like I've missed out on so much!
>> >
>> > My first computer was an Intel Pentium 4 with 256MB RAM and 40GB HDD.
>> > Hopefully I'll get to at least tinker with some of the old tech!
>> >
>> > Regards,
>> > Atharva Lele
>> >
>> >
>> > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 11:43 AM Daniel Ortiz <
>> > elamigodanielortiz at gmail.com>
>> > wrote:
>> >
>> > > If it is desired or decided to try to replicate the experience of paper
>> > > tape coding then theoretically Google's teachable machine could be one
>> > > component used to accomplish that:
>> > > https://teachablemachine.withgoogle.com
>> > >
>> > > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 11:02 AM Russell Senior <
>> > russell at personaltelco.net
>> > > >
>> > > wrote:
>> > >
>> > > > You can still get the clack-clack-ding-ding without the hardware:
>> > > >
>> > > > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jd5oomwEBb0
>> > > >
>> > > > but it's hard to replicate the smell of paper tape.
>> > > >
>> > > > On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 4:08 AM Keith Lofstrom <keithl at kl-ic.com>
>> > wrote:
>> > > > >
>> > > > > "My first computer" was a DEC PDP8 at Tektronix, which I
>> > > > > was allowed to use at age 16 in 1969. The programming was
>> > > > > language was FOCAL. No disk drive - I/O was an ASR-33
>> > > > > teletype, and a "high speed" 60 character-per-second paper
>> > > > > tape reader.
>> > > > >
>> > > > > I compare that to my new 80 gram, 1 Terabyte SATA3 solid
>> > > > > state drive. A terabyte of paper tape would fill a cube
>> > > > > 20 meters on a side, weigh more than 10,000 metric tonnes,
>> > > > > and take 530 years to read.
>> > > > >
>> > > > > Not all was bad back then. The lawns we kids were told
>> > > > > to get off of were larger.
>> > > > >
>> > > > > Keith
>> > > > >
>> > > > > --
>> > > > > Keith Lofstrom keithl at keithl.com
>> > > >
>> > >
>> >
>>
>
> --
> [image: www.seattleangelconference.com]
> <http://www.seattleangelconference.com/>
>
> *JOHN SECHREST*
> *Founder, *Seattle Angel Conference
> TEL (541) 250-0844 EMAIL sechrest at seattleangel.com
> Schedule A Meeting <https://sechrest.youcanbook.me/>
>
> http://seattleangelconference.com
> @sechrest


More information about the PLUG mailing list