Last month, Charles and I were discussing progamming in the “olden days”. This is a game that I win, easily.1
Charles made the observation that any conversation about old hardware tends to descend into some variant of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, with the punch line becomes “Ones and Zeroes? You were Lucky!”.
At any rate, the conversation go me thinking of the differences between my current PC and the first PC I owned, the Commodore 64.
| Current Machine | C64 | Multiple | |
| Processor Speed | 1.667 GHz | 1MHz | 1667 + The PC’s instructions do more work + More instructions are executed per cycle |
| RAM | 512Mb | 64Kb | 8192. Let’s not talk about memory access speeds. |
| Secondary Storage | Hard disk – 80Gb | Cassette tape – 36kb per C20 | 2.2 Million |
| Secondary Storage Transfer Rate | 58Mbytes/s | 300 baud | 1.9 million |
| Cost per Megabyte | 0.0025AUD | 25.00AUD (10 tapes) | 10,000 |
| Pixels on Screen | 1,470,000 | 64,000 | 23 |
| Colours On Screen | 16Million | 16 | 1,000,000 |
| Modem Speed (Downstream) | 5Mbit (cable) | 1200 | 4,167 |
| Modem Speed (Upstream) | 100kbit | 75 | 1,333 |
| Cost | 2000AUD | 1100AUD (including TV) | 1.8 |
These numbers are mind-blowing. If your mind has not blown, please go back and look at the numbers again. Contemplate what it means to have 2.2 million times as much storage—or 8,000 times as much memory—at one’s disposal.
Note: C64 stats are taken from Phill’s Commodore Page.
1 I haven’t even had to pull out my trump card yet: I ran my first program on a late model acoustic-coupled teletype (similar to “some of these (pictures of teletypes from the Topeka Museum)” that had a built in basic interpreter. It would have been around 1978 or 79. In fact, I seemed to ‘win’ simply by mentioning that I had worked with 8 inch floppy disks.
And if you think I am being petty making a competitive game out of a simple conversation, you need to read this.