The good old days?
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Storage of IBM record cards at the Federal records center in Alexandria, Virginia, November 1959. Between 1950 and 1966 the records centers received millions of cubic feet of records, saving the federal government more than the total spent for the entire operation of the National Archives Records Service." Note: There are about 20 rows of pallets visible, each row is 15 pallets wide, pallets are stacked two high (at least). Each pallet contains 45 boxes of punched cards. Standard card boxes contained 2000 cards. Each card held up to 80 characters, for a total of about 4.3 billion characters of data in this storage facility - about the same as a 4GB flash drive.
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The Raiders of the Lost Ark warehouse, or this?
Of course that would really be 100 warehouses, according to the label on the card.
@blaineg “Only” 400 GB?
/image SanDisk 1TB micro SD
@blaineg @narfcake The SDXC spec allows for cards to theoretically be up to 2TB. Not too long ago, that sounded like a pipe dream!
I found this Wired article the other day from '09.
That was surprisingly prophetic of Wired. Samsung and Xiaomi recently came out with 100+ MP cameras on their phones… coincidence?
@blaineg @narfcake @sleuth I wish people would realise more MP does not mean better camera and stop the push for ever more MP. MP is the amount of data required to store the image, not how good quality the image actually is. There are 12mp cameras out there that are better quality than the 20mp cameras.
It reminds me of the ever increasing push to make phones thinner. Like I care if my phone gets thinner… It’s already plenty thin enough. I’d rather they make it thicker and give me a battery that lasts all day.
I don’t need a thinner phone and I don’t need more MP. I’d settle for a camera on a phone with 20mp that takes good quality crisp photos in most lighting situations and also have decent shutter speed so my subjects don’t need to stand like statues.
What I don’t need is a photo that isn’t crisp but uses up lots of data and has more pixels than any screen I’m ever going to view it on.
@blaineg @narfcake @OnionSoup Totally agree. Don’t get me wrong, megapixels do matter to a degree, but especially for phones, we’ve definitely long passed it. Now if phones could start getting into sensor size wars, then things might get interesting, but for the time being I’ll still be carrying my 16MP DSLR with my 50MP smartphone.
@narfcake @OnionSoup @sleuth What? You mean things like glass and aperture make a difference?
@narfcake @OnionSoup @sleuth Though I’m very impressed with the computed photography tricks Google pulls off on my Pixel 3’s camera. The Night Sight mode is unbelievable.
It would be interesting to see those tricks applied to a “real” camera.
@blaineg @narfcake @OnionSoup @sleuth …and give me a removeable battery!
@blaineg @jester747 @narfcake @OnionSoup @sleuth
Ha ha ha That’s cute!
Say the phone manufacturers.
@blaineg @f00l @narfcake @OnionSoup @sleuth Samsung did make this niche-y guy earlier in the year, so they know it’s still a valuable feature…
https://www.samsung.com/us/business/products/mobile/phones/galaxy-xcover-pro/
Oddly enough, as battery life gets better and better, and battery packs and chargers have become ubiquitous… a new reason for wanting a removable battery is to get off the grid when so desired! <cough> <cough> not ME though… I just want to extend the useful-life/peak-performance of my phone beyond 1.5-2 years.
@blaineg @jester747 @narfcake @sleuth I have a removable battery and I do switch batteries at times.
LG V20, I think one of the last phones to have one.
@jester747 @narfcake @OnionSoup @sleuth
No! The only thing you want is thin. No battery!
@blaineg @narfcake @OnionSoup @sleuth I had the V20 also, and yup, it was my last phone with swappable batteries. I now have the v60 and kid-you-not it will go a full day and a half with considerable usage, so for me swapping really would be about extending the useful life of this thing once the battery capacity starts to dwindle.
Probably as close to a physical example of Moore’s Law as you can see. Amazing!
… but don’t want to relive it. I like files I can carry around on a keyring.
Batch cards (mine) from 1968-71:
These went on top of the punch cards to separate batches and get the computer time charged to the right place. Yellow was for students and had limited computer time. Brown was for faculty//staff, but creative students could get them by being an unpaid gopher for a faculty member, which included typing their punch cards and running programs for them.
@rockblossom Or become friends with the student working who actually fed the cards into the machine.
I loved those Hollerith cards. My mom was a keypunch operator and used to bring discarded ones home for us to use for shopping lists and notes. They were also great bookmarks.
When I was young our local library kept boxes of used punch cards on top of the card catalog to use for notes.That’s always the first thing I think of when I think of punch cards.
@Nate311
We used the “holes” (the punched out parts) as confetti at football games. And one friend made a Christmas wreath out of them by curving the short edges together in a point, stapling them, then attaching them in a seriesof stacked concentric circles.
@chienfou @Nate311 Oh yea, I remember crafts with punch cards!
That’s a very sobering example of how much computing has shrunk over the years! Amazing.
Are we sure that picture isn’t the current postal backlog?
@spitfire6006006 Yes we are sure. It is one of Pitney Bowes’s shipping facilities where our packages sit.
@spitfire6006006
/giphy sigh
My Dad & I did a rough calculation on punch card vs SD card capacity a few years ago, but we must a slipped a few decimals, because we were figuring on filling a room in the house, not a warehouse.
He was dealing with punch cards when I was a little kid.
I’ve got a metal ruler he gave me years ago. It has many different scales:
16th’s of an inch (like a normal ruler)
10th’s of an inch
6th’s & 12th’s of an inch (not sure why)
And
5/32’s of an inch - or “Cards”.
According to the ruler there are 150 cards per inch.
@blaineg There’s the other side.
I remember looking at Fortran punch cards so much that I could read them by sight. Later, I wrote code that printed up the USPS barcode for ZIP sorting (Yep, those sorting machines) on 9-pin dot matrix printers, and looked at those so much that I could read those too. Fucking QR codes did me in, though. I can’t read those on sight.
/image i rememba
/giphy dot matrix
@f00l
/giphy “dot matrix printout”
@f00l
Gad.
Bad giphy! Bad!