Those were the days:




Who the hell needs a case:




An Erector Set, some PVC, and an overclocked CPU:




And last,but not least, I'd hate to pay this electric bill:

 

Computers (and prices) have certainly changed over the years.

That last pic was taken inside a raised-floor datacenter. Monitors appear to be connected to the Compaq NT servers sitting on the floor and you can see what looks like HP (or really old IBMs) servers over on the right.

 

Wow. The ultimate in home made!

Do you think the Tidy Cat in the background was what they used instead of silicon to make the chips for this computer?

 

Great pix!

 

Back in 1968, the first IBM computer I ever worked on was the old 360/30 - the "read a record, write a record", NO keyboard, you had to decipher information from a panel of lights, load LOTS of punch cards (and pick them up off the floor and try to put them back in order (LOL), just a few tape drives (maybe 5 or so), no disk storage, and it took a whole room of climate comtrolled space to house it. Yhe one I worked on was one of the first one or two like it in Altanta.

1970's - powerful 1/2 meg machines, rooms with tape drives, rooms with disk drives, rooms with printers, all on climate controlled raised floor. These would handle all the "Online" capabilities for terminals and tellers all over a state or even an entire region.

1980's - TWO meg machines - WOW. Still lots of raised floor, cooled space.

Now - The battery or Solar powered calculator you now use, your cellphone, your digital camera, you wristwatch - all have comparable (or more) processing power than equipment that used to take up an entire room...

And we still cannot "cure" the common cold!

 

I was strolling down memory lane the other day, looking at some Excel spreadsheets I hadn't opened in a long time. One was titled "startup.xls" from December 1999 (pre-bubble-burst) and it detailed the Dell servers I had planned to purchase for Ownersite.com...

Dual PIII 550, 2GB RAM, 27GB HD, RAID 5 - $30,000.00 each!

Today's cost is about 10% of that amount...for a much more powerful machine with five times the storage!

 

My first real computer was a 286. (I'm not counting my Tandy with a tape cassette).

I was estatic when I was later able to upgrade to a VGA card with 256 colors and a sound card.

I had cutting edge technology

 

Buying in "bulk" could have saved you some money.

I found a quote from 1998 where we were installing 32 low-end Intel servers and a Cisco network switch. The project total was $399,211.