Technology

A kilobyte must have sounded like so much memory back then.

A byte is 8 bits. Even if we want to call bits quarters ($0.25) and bytes dollars, 69KB would be $69,000! That's a lot of dollars.

(And it's actually 1,024 or something instead of 1,000, which just increases it that much more).

It's crazy how KBs used to be incredibly meaningful, and now we're buying multi-TB drives like they're nothing!

EDIT: Math fail. Let's say TWO bits are a quarter...lmao

Funny observation on the side:

This content is geoblocked in Germany.
And, as far as I can tell, trying a few destinations with my VPN: only in Germany...

So what the hell is in there, that we Germans must not see???? 😆

It and its sibling are probably the only working examples of flywire memory left in existence. That memory with little ferrite cores threaded with 3 wires was very labour intensive to make but was the backbone of the entire computing industry at the time. Very solid and reliable.

In 1977 69 KB was huge memory. First home PC's from 1980 and 1981 like ZX81 they have 1 KB of memory. One.

Link gives me a 403 error

Hopefully it doesn't get blown up by some bored Klingon.

Nice

Aliens find it and love our retro tech. "8 track!"

Does anyone know if the code that Voyager 1 (or similar era tech) is running is available anywhere for inspection? I would love to poke around in such a historical code base.

Why 8 tracks? They always sucked, even when they were in their prime. Cassettes were always the far superior format in every way.

The only advantage an 8 track might have is that it was on a loop, so it would repeat by being on a single hub, and, spooling out from the center, and regathering on the outside. That required a dry lubricant on the back of the tape, that would eventually wear off, and the tape would jam up. It was even more prevalent with longer than average albums, like double albums (White Album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, etc.).

I guarantee that that 8-track loop jammed up decades ago.

ah..back when Star Trek had some actual science fiction in plots.