Technology ... now and then

[cro memcos]

I am the proud owner of a new Smartphone.   I reflect on the fact that in 1979  (or thereabouts) I spent over 1500 GBP on a Cromemco System Z2.    

The modified but still working system is still running today

The 90KB Wango drive was over 200 GBP I remember.  I think that  Cromemco Z80 processor card came from the UK distributor Comart, and maybe even the empty chassis too.

Initially I could only afford 1 floppy diskette drive!

Now it is 2021.   I paid less than 200 GBP for an 8 Processor Smartphone with each processor running 500 times faster than baby Cromemco.   

Instead of 64KB of memory I am now almost drowning in over 5000 MB of memory, an increase of over 90,000 times.   Almost incomprehensible.

Oh and it fits in my pocket, unlike the Cromemco which almost gives me hernia when I move it from the study to the lounge.

The whole Smartphone costs less than the 90KB Wangco floppy drive.  Imagine that.

I really never thought I'd see such progress within a lifetime.

[Amardeep Chana]

Indeed it's a change of scale that my mind can't really get itself around.  The interesting thing is it took 20 or more years from the Z-2 days before mainstream computers (i.e. that most people could afford) could walk and chew gum at the same time.  In the early 1980s we enjoyed a Z-80 system that could run concurrent tasks, had a sophisticated hierarchical file system with permissions, multiple users, and a functional user shell.  From the late 1980s to early 2000s it was unstable single user environments and file systems that got corrupted at every little glitch.  The smartphone was the inevitable follow-on to the return of good compute environments.  We just use them as appliances now.

Amardeep

[Amardeep Chana]

I was meaning to ask...did you add the third 5.25" drive bay to the front of that Z-2?  I've never seen one like that before.

On Tuesday, July 13, 2021 at 5:17:30 AM UTC-4 cro memcos wrote:

[cro memcos]

Amardeep  ... very well spotted re three drives.   The third drive 'expansion' was a home grown conversion involving a hand saw and then some filing.   (In the days before everybody had power tools!)

,m