[AT] Slightly OT Tractors and technology

[charlie hill]

If anyone is interested in one of those drives, I bought mine on a site 
called Retrevo.com.
I just tried to go to the site and it appears to be down temporarily.  I 
think they are a
clearance outfit so they might well be out of them but doing a web search I 
found
this site 
http://www.buydig.com/shop/search.aspx?kwd=Western+Digital+My+Passport+2+TB
that lists several WD Passport models.  None quite as good a deal as I got 
but still not bad.

Charlie

-----Original Message----- 
From: Stephen Offiler
Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2014 9:53 AM
To: Antique tractor email discussion group
Subject: Re: [AT] Slightly OT Tractors and technology

That's beyond amazing.  Just mind-boggling.

First computer I owned was a genuine IBM PC, the first model that replaced
the 8088 with the 80286 processor. This was in the mid 1980's, probably
just shy of 30 years ago. It had a 30 megabyte hard drive.  It ran DOS.  It
cost $3000 ($6600 in today's dollars).  It's a long story, but a friend who
was starting a small business purchased it (for tax writeoff purposes) and
I did work for him to pay it off.  I am thinking that hard drive, in very
rough numbers, must have been worth about $500 ($1100 in today's dollars).
Charlie could buy 16 of those 1.5T drives for $1100.  24 terabytes versus
30 megabytes!!!

24T is 2.639E13 bytes

30M is 3.146E7 bytes.

Dividing, you get a factor of about 839,000 times more capacity for the
buck!

Viewed in terms of Moore's Law:  839,000 is 2 raised to a factor of 20
(pretty darn close anyway)... in other words, it has doubled 20 times in 30
years.  That's an average of once every 18 months.  That is EXACTLY what
Moore's Law states!  Fascinating stuff!

-SO



On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 10:31 PM, charlie hill <charliehill at embarqmail.com>
wrote:

> Correction.  I just looked at my online banking and that 1.5 TB drive
> was $69.00 with free shipping.
>
> Charlie
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: charlie hill
> Sent: Monday, June 30, 2014 10:19 PM
> To: Antique tractor email discussion group
> Subject: [AT] Slightly OT Tractors and technology
>
> I remember when I first learned of this group
> when Spencer was running it out of the Forsythe County
> servers.   I think I was running a 286 computer
> with Win. 3.1.  If I remember right it just had a few megabytes
> of memory.  About a month ago I upgraded my Android
> phone to a model that has 32 gigabytes of memory,  That
> phone cost less money than that old 286 computer by about half
> and it was used when I bought it.
>
> Then last week I saw a deal online and ordered it.  It came today
> and I just installed it.  A 1.5 TB  Western Digital external hard drive.
> It's about as bit as a deck of playing cards and it cost me a whopping
> $89 bucks with free shipping.
>
> Meanwhile the price of old tractors continues to go up and new
> tractors have gone out of sight.
>
>
>
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