New Computer

[MossRoad]

I worked on Dec Vax and the hard drive enclosures were the size of a large dishwasher.
Using cassettes on early home computers to load programs needed to be planned due to the time it took to load.
I still use desktops as storage servers (pictures, videos, music) and for backups of all our devices from school chromebooks to iphones/android phones and various laptops.

For large storage requirements now, desktops are great, cheap and the larger cases can hold a lot of drives to present on the network. Both run Unix apps.

I don't always follow phone directions, sometimes veering off the path a bit and letting the phone calculate a new path, will take you to new places.

Directions on a phone are recommendations, I think some people don't understand that.

I still have two of the large platters from our Dec washing machine. People think they're some sort of record. No, that's a disk from a disk drive. Something ridiculously small like 64mb per platter. Can't recall.

And you're not exaggerating when you say they were the size of a dishwasher. But they're actually a little larger.

Found this a few minutes ago....

 

[MossRoad]

I worked on Dec Vax and the hard drive enclosures were the size of a large dishwasher.
...

That reminded me of the first day I worked at the Newspaper back in 1987. They took me into the computer room to show me around, then yelled at me for walking too hard!

WHAT?

You're walking too hard. You have to walk gently on the raised floor near the DEC drives or your footsteps will crash the drives.

And never pull the chair out from the DECWriter LA120 printer console too fast, or slam it back in, because you'll crash the hard drives.

And never let the door to the computer room slam, because you'll crash the hard drives.



Jeeze, it was like walking in a mine field.

 

[WinterDeere]

I think the desktop is now a dead end technology

I guess it depends on how you define "desktop". Engineers doing design and simulation work will continue to favor high-power localized computing for the foreseeable future, and there's only so much you can pack into a laptop, budget aside. I typically have a row of several Dell 7800 or 7900 workstations ganged up on or under my desk, and we still (if errantly) often call them "desktop" computers... they sit on our desks. Yes, they're marketed as "Workstations", but using the word always feels too pretentious.

At some point, this work may largely move over to cloud computing, a'la Azure. But looking at that trend over the last ten years shows its failing to live up to expectation for most engineering applications, with regard to cost and flexibility (not to mention software licensing), when compared to a $6k - $10k computer sitting on each engineer's or designer's desk.

 

[JasperFrank]

When we got Work Stations to refurb, they were a difficult sell. You had to explain that these were designed to the cutting edges of their time, and in most cases , far beyond what any desk top was designed, to do, and designed to work 24/7. So yes, its a 7 year old machine, but this computer when new, was 8 thousand dollars and built with the best materials and engineering available. It will still out perform anything you can get at a big box store for 500 dollars. And we couldn't sell them for 150 dollars.

 

[buckeyefarmer]

You still need a workstation to get to cloud computing.

 

[Oaktree]

Like it’s been mentioned before, if you have any computer with a spinning HD get an SSD. You will really be surprised at how quick it boots up, not kidding.

I replaced the HD in my laptop with an SSD a couple years ago, and it does boot up a lot faster. Especially appreciated because I primarily use it at worksites and there's less waiting around when I need it. I'm sure it also makes for longer battery life, though I've never tested that.
Of course the first one failed after 6 mo. or so and it's a PITA to get at where the drive is located to re-replace it.

My wife visited family in another state over the holidays. At one point, I remember her telling me that her family was sitting around the living room on their phones.

Maybe 10 years ago a woman I worked with mentioned that her daughter had some friends over. She said it was creepy...no one spoke to one another, they just sat in the same room sending text messages.

 

[WinterDeere]

You still need a workstation to get to cloud computing.

Not really, just a terminal. A nice $500 machine can provide access to computing resources similar to a $20k- $40k machine (i.e. multi-GPU machine). But there are other issues, surrounding both graphics, costs, and licensing.

When we got Work Stations to refurb, they were a difficult sell. You had to explain that these were designed to the cutting edges of their time, and in most cases , far beyond what any desk top was designed, to do, and designed to work 24/7. So yes, its a 7 year old machine, but this computer when new, was 8 thousand dollars and built with the best materials and engineering available. It will still out perform anything you can get at a big box store for 500 dollars. And we couldn't sell them for 150 dollars.

Hah, yeah... I know this scenario. My old computers (and those of the rest of the R&D staff) would continue to live in the building with most employers, at least 10 - 15 years beyond purchase. I'd be done with them after 2 years, for my tasks, but they'd make a kick-ass CAD station for another 5 years after that, and a damn good general computer for admin's or production staff after that. There were a few CAD guys who knew enough to know they were getting a better machine than they'd get otherwise, but not all of them understood.

What always blew my mind was the cost of some of the graphics cards used by the CAD guys. They'd take a $6k machine and put a $5k graphics card into it. My need for graphics was always much less, but I needed big GPU's for massive parallel processing tasks. There are certain things for which 32 CPU's will never beat 4096 GPU threads.

 

[Oaktree]

I worked on Dec Vax and the hard drive enclosures were the size of a large dishwasher.

I worked with them in the late 80s/early 90s myself. The disc packs in those old CDC hard drives had a whopping 300M capacity and weighed probably 30 lb.!! Now you can fit 512 G on an SD card the size of your thumbnail.

 

[Oaktree]

That reminded me of the first day I worked at the Newspaper back in 1987. They took me into the computer room to show me around, then yelled at me for walking too hard!

WHAT?

You're walking too hard. You have to walk gently on the raised floor near the DEC drives or your footsteps will crash the drives.

And never pull the chair out from the DECWriter LA120 printer console too fast, or slam it back in, because you'll crash the hard drives.

And never let the door to the computer room slam, because you'll crash the hard drives.



Jeeze, it was like walking in a mine field.

Yeah, when I started my first tech job right out of college in 1970 the company used drum memory. Probably half again as big as that DEC drive you showed the picture of and a capacity of 8 M!!! Sheesh, you could barely put a Word document on something like that today, but back then we thought it was huge. They too were very sensitive to vibration, and unlike a drive if you had a head crash it had to be sent back to the factory.

 

[WinterDeere]

Jeez... you guys are old.

"I remember when we stored data on a Victrola!"