Quote Originally Posted by Alan Rutherford View Post
... Today a $10 32-gigabyte flash drive would equal the capacity of 8,126,464 of those chunks of core memory and my phone has far more computing power than that AN/FSQ-7 did.

...Using it well will be a challenge.
What Mr Moore didn't describe is how much the cost per bit would drop with time!

The computer I built in the '70s had a whopping 56K of memory by the time I got done with it. Took a 20 amp power supply to run it, helped keep the house warm. Each 8K static memory board had 1434 connections to solder and cost $250 in kit form. I once calculated how much the memory in my Motorola smart phone would cost at $30 a kilobyte and the power needed. I can't remember the numbers but it would have needed a building and more power than feeds my shop.

And the computer with 56K was incredible - I built a graphics board I wrote my own "almost" flight simulator and could zoom around and look at a simple database with homebuilt joysticks. The 2MHz computer was fast enough to update the screen at several times per second. I even had a 10 MB hard disk drive connected at the end. Who could possibly need more storage space than that. Good clean fun!

But your last comment says it all. I don't get out much but today I must have seen 10 drivers using their handheld supercomputers to endanger the community.

JKJ