Posted: . At: 5:33 PM. This was 11 years ago. Post ID: 5948
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How far we have come since the olden days of computing technology.

Windows 95 floppies.
Windows 95 floppies.

Our computing technology has come so far since the early days of the 8086 and 8088 x86 computers. We used computers back then with 640K of RAM and we liked it. But these days we have machines with 12 Gigabytes of RAM. I remember my father sending me to the computer shop to purchase a 1 megabyte ISA RAM upgrade for an old 286 and it was AU$600.00! That is amazing to think about these days when you can go out and buy a 2 Gigabyte DDR3 RAM stick for a laptop for about AU$35.00. That is the technological advancement for you. The first computers such as the ENIAC took up an entire wharehouse and had less computing power than a cheap Android phone has these days. But World War 2 was the genesis of much of the technology that we make use of today. Now that we are experimenting with quantum computers and we have multicore CPU`s that are much more powerful and energy efficient than ever before, we can truly say we have reached a milestone in computing. Video cards are becoming more and more powerful these days as well, they are practically supercomputers compared to the older cards like the 3DFX Voodoo 2. Even the Oak Technology OTIVGA 8872967 ISA video card was pretty good in its time. having 512 Kilobytes of graphics memory was pretty good in the 90`s. You could have a 640*480 resolution desktop at 256 colors.

A 286 x86 PC. The good old days of DOS.
A 286 x86 PC. The good old days of DOS.

Although there are monitors these days that support 2560 x 1440 WQHD. This is a lot of desktop real estate on one monitor. See one here on NewEgg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236294. Before this monitor existed though, there was this beast: http://www.dooyoo.co.uk/crt-monitor/sony-gdm-w900/. The Sony GDM W900 24″ CRT. This beast weighs 40.5 KG and would be quite the hefty screen to have on your desktop. Assuming the desk can support the weight of this monstrosity. But this monitor has a resolution of 1920*1440, not bad for a CRT. Now we have 4K resolution screens coming out that can support much higher resolutions. ASUS have released a monitor that supports a 3840*2160 pixels resolution for the amazing price of US$3499.00. This is a massive resolution for one monitor and an indication of what is to come in the future. Another technology that has improved is hard disk drives. In the old days they only held 10 megabytes. Now we can purchase a 3 terabyte hard disk drive for a very cheap price. I have seen one on Amazon.com for $118.00, that is amazing considering the amount of storage space that drive has. Now that we have left 1.44MB floppy disks behind, everyone is either using Dropbox or USB thumb drives to take files from one place to another.

That is the benefit of having broadband Internet. The days of 56 kilobytes per second modems to access the Internet. Those were the days of the familiar dial-up tones and using Hyperterminal to communicate with your modem to query its status. These AT commands are a thing of the past, but knowing them could still be useful. if you are interested in the amount of bandwidth a modem had, this bandwidth calculator will help you find out. This useful web page allows you to calculate the bandwidth of various data transfer methods. Very useful when you need to convert between units of measurement. The bd thing about using dial-up Internet is the charges accrued for using the telephone line to dial the ISP and connect to the Internet. But dial-up Internet accounts these days are cheap as chips, there is a company offering dial-up Internet accounts for less than the price of a coffee. See the list of numbers here: http://www.dialup4less.com/locations.html. This is a very cheap Internet service as logn as you avoid the price of long distance telephone charges to connect to an Internet provider. This is not a paid advertisement for this company obiter dictum, but I just wanted to put this out there as it might be useful to someone who is reading this post.

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