I remember when a 30mb download was big
ColemanRugh
Posts: 511
in The Commons
I remember in like 2002-2003 I had dial-up and I bought a Vicki2 product that was a 30 megabyte file and I wasn't sure I'd be able to download it. I think the download died on me 3 or 4 times before I was able to get the whole file.
Tonight I just downloaded a 1 gig purchase :P
Times are changing fast - ha ha
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In computing terms, yea, 15 years is a lifetime.. :) even 2 years is pushing it really ;)
I went to a museum a while a go that had some of the old IBM computring system, and their predecessors there. A couple of very knowledgable elderly gentlemen and ladies explained to us how things worked back then, and how you put holes on punch cards, and things. The early machines had 8 bit! of memory.
I still remember my very first own PC I bought back in 1998, which had 80mb of HD, and I kept telling myself "You'll never use all that memory, this will last you forever!" because text editors only created small files, and even images were comparatively small. Sound was midi, and short low-sample wavs, and the same is true for videos....
Check out this thread: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/228886/ot-old-tyme-computing-for-only-5995/p1
I couldn't agree more. It's getting to the point where I might have to start returning items because of file size. I have several products in my product library I haven't d/led yet because of the file size and my crappy internet. I am to the point where I wish the file sizes were posted on the product page so I can see it before purchase. It's sad to have to use a d/l manager to d/l DS items.
BTW what was the i gig items so I can pass on it.
The first computer I did serious work on was an IBM System 36, with 256 kilobytes of memory (later updated to 512kb). Things have come some way since then, my mobile phone has 4 gigabytes of memory and can be upgraded to 16gb.
Cheers,
Alex.
Gak! In my first technical job, I used punch cards for a room sized computer, so I guess that makes me an elderly gentleman. Then. in the early 70's, I was part of a partnership (trading as Modular Computer Systems) that designed and manufactured early 8 bit PC's, even using the revolutionary Intel 8080 processors!
While I was in college, I got a job at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center from 1978 though 1982, and the first computer I operated was an IBM 360-20. It shipped with a whopping 4K but by the end of the production run could be upgraded to a whopping 32k... and among the things that ran on it while I was there was data from the first Jovian flyby missions and the first flights of the Enterprise and Columbia. Here's a picture of that state-of-the-art bad boy: :)
In the early days, when memory was scarce, programmers used every trick available to keep ram usage and file sizes as small as possible.
Nowadays ram and HD space is cheap, and programmers get away with being lazy...
To show an extreme example - in 1440 autocoder (assembler) programs the instruction "A *-7,ctr" showed up frequently. "A" was 'add'; '*-7' was the memory location of the 'add' operation code - which just happened to be '1'. So this would add 1 to the variable 'ctr' and the coder saved one whole character of memory by doing this. But when you're working with 4 KB that can be significant.
About 1980 I'd left the space center and was working for a private consulting firm. One of the younger guys in the lab, fresh out of school, was tasked with writing some simple subroutine to do a little arithmetic in assembler for a project that was trying to calculate real-time signal transmission timing for satellite communication. The algorithm was simple multiplication and division of scaled integers, no floating point necessary. Just shift some of the arguments left or right appropriately do the math and shift the result back and remember the remainder. When we integrated his subroutine into the project we found a devistating bottleneck around his subroutine. I inspected his routine and found that he had taken the routine's input binary numbers, then used the FORTRAN library to convert the binary numbers to a floating point string of characters, then somehow used FORTRAN routines & print statement routines to calculate the value of the character strings. Then he converted the floating point string back to a floating point number and then that back to an to integer and remainder to be returned as a values of the subroutine.
It took three of us "old-timers" a half hour of explaining the resulting machine code, to show him and convince him how inefficient that was. His argument was "but it works doesn't it?" We all agreed, that yes, it was ingenious but we weren't giving out prizes for that type of ingenuity. 
I guess he was familiar with how to make calls to FORTRAN function routines but wasn't comfortable with shifts in assembler. I think we finally got through to him how to do math that way.
Someone I know just gave me her old iPhone (needed one for debugging IOS apps) when she upgraded to the latest one, I was a bit surprised when I checked the settings and saw it had 64GB internal memory. That's 8 times as much as my PCs.
That will be 64GB of SSD storage memory (ie: think of it as the disk space you have on your PC), not internal memory like on your PC. The internal memory on most smart phones is 1-2 GB.
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OK, guess I mixed up RAM and storage - not much into SmartPhone tech, got my first one a few months ago. Still, with the iPhone it's internal storage, not a memory card, quite a bit for a phone from 2012. My new Android which was released sep. 2017 has only 16 GB.
Heh, be glad you're not a gamer, as my 60-70 Gb Doom 4 download took 30 mins-to-an hour downloading...
This entire bundle - https://www.daz3d.com/ibl-skies-perfect-skies-bundle - is 28GB. The two largest sets in it are 6GB each.
Yowza. I've got that on my wishlist — I might need to set aside half an evening for downloading when I finally buy it.