IBM’s 305 RAMAC was considered to be the first “super” computer with an HDD, and the HDD module alone weighed over a ton and wouldn’t hold enough information to send a single JPG image from most DSLRs. Amazingly, it was not rendered obsolete until 1962 and stayed on the market until 1969. The cost of storing data on this monster was $3,200 per month, which is over $160,000 in today’s dollars.
Wow!
How did they make that monstrous thing work? Now we’re so used to carrying around our tiny little memory cards and flash drives that hold hundreds of GB of data and so the 1956 “supercomputer” just seems so surreal! It’s fascinating to think of the advances we’d have made in another 50 years!
Gotta love the transistor. Without that invention, we would still be stuck with vacuum tube computers. The thing is that we’re starting to hit a wall when it comes to circuits. For the past few decades we’ve followed Moore’s Law, which is a prediction stating that the number of transistors in a given chip would double every 18-24 months. The problem now is that we’ve made the transistors so small that quantum effects start to become prominent, which is why we’ve started seeing dual and quad core computers. Using those, we’re still on pace with Moore’s Law.
The current area of research is quantum computing. It is still in its infancy, but its potential is incredible in that it could crack any current security algorithm. People have actually started researching security measures for transistor based computers that could stand up to quantum computing. I’ve even heard of DNA based computers, which would use the 4 bases as opposed to 1’s and 0’s, to store data. Harvard university managed to store 700 kbs of data onto DNA. Extrapolating that, we could potentially store 700 TBs in 1 gram of DNA.
We’re probably decades away from any of this becoming the norm, but it’s strange to think that the manner in which our computers operate will one day become obsolete.
That sounds pretty darn fascinating. Technology has been changing so rapidly so I wouldn’t be surprised if something like that happened sooner rather then later.
Yeah no doubt. There is always a gap between commercialization and conception, although given the prevalence of the internet I think the gap is shortening and people are more informed so we get news on “futaristic” inventions more easily.
For example, plasma TVs were functional in the 80’s and it took 15-20 years for them to hit the market.
Not only do we get the news faster but the actual cycle to go from idea to production has become vastly shorter. In my grandfather’s time whatever happened in his father’s time happened in his time which happened in his son’s time.
Nowadays what happened in my father’s time is not what’s happening in my life. And it most certainly won’t be what will happen in my son’s time. Its seems like yesterday that Google came out with Nexus1 …
