When technology impresses you

[john2443]

loafer123 said:

Back when a floppy disk was actually floppy!

...and why a friend told a girl at work that 3 1/2" ones were called a stiffy. How they laughed when she asked someone if he had a stiffy.

(May be apocryphal !l

[thebraketester]

loafer123 said:

thebraketester said:

Gary C said:

Just turned on a 38 year old BBC micro and it worked !

Now that has impressed me
l.

5.25” floppy?

Back when a floppy disk was actually floppy!

“Flaccid”

[Alias218]

Last year when Falcon Heavy almost (2/3) landed itself. Seeing the side boosters land themselves almost simultaneously was deeply impressive.

[LarryUSA]

Integroo said:

Folding phones

Not seen one in the flesh yet, but i want one

Announced today, released in April: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/02/20/samsung-galax...

[48k]

The fact that a Space Shuttle Orbiter could be in space travelling at over 17000mph and an hour later have found and landed on a runway 3 miles long using a computer that has 1MB of memory - not even enough to hold a single photo on my mobile phone. Boggles my mind every time I think about it.

[gazzarose]

jdw100 said:

Quick change spring bars on watch straps.

No more fiddling about with spring bar tools.

Makes changing a watch strap so much easier!



Searchable photos now on iPhone.

I have 6,000 odd photos in the iCloud and on my phone - you can find what you want by typing in the date or specific words like..car, watch, Paris, party, wedding, beach....I just typed in 'beer' to test this out..brings up a load of photos with people holding beers. Amazing.


eBooks.

I used to have close to 1,000 books taking up masses of room. Now I buy for my Kindle or Kindle app on iPad. Hundreds of books on there, I can take 5 new books on a flight and they weigh nothing and take up no room. Download a sample for free as well....

This has really had a positive impact on my life. Again...amazing.

Is there some QI type fact that a full kindle weighs a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny bit more than an empty one!

[RammyMP]

Killer2005 said:

Google translate for ne

Reads anything in foreign Language and translates it for you. Mind blown.

I agree, my lad showed me it when we were on holiday, translating a menu, yes, mind blown! The fact it worked offline too amazed me!

[gregs656]

Alias218 said:

Last year when Falcon Heavy almost (2/3) landed itself. Seeing the side boosters land themselves almost simultaneously was deeply impressive.

That's a good one.

[GroundEffect]

thebraketester said:

Bit of a different one but what amazes me is that between the early/mid 90s and ~2000 we went from having 66Mhz to roughly 1Ghz processors.

Yet 19 years on the fastest in terms of clock speed is only about 3.5Ghz. I know it’s not just about clock speed but I would have thought we would be tuning much higher clock speeds by now.

Single core vs multi-multi core.

Intel's i9 9980XE is an 18 Core, 26 Thread CPU running at 4.40GHz when at max speed.

18 Cores!

[Cold]

Those doors at the supermarket that open by themselves when you get close.

It's like being on bloomin' Star Trek.

[StanleyT]

48k said:

The fact that a Space Shuttle Orbiter could be in space travelling at over 17000mph and an hour later have found and landed on a runway 3 miles long using a computer that has 1MB of memory - not even enough to hold a single photo on my mobile phone. Boggles my mind every time I think about it.

As my IT guy at work says "lazy programming". He should know, his response to "why are our corporate laptops so slow" (run at 5.5 GB Ram and 100% CPU for a while after boot) is "bloatware and idle programmers". The processing power of the control and information systems of the entire UK North Sea rigs when each field was commissioned is cumulatively less that a standard Dell desktop is now. And fortunately, crashed less. And, didn't have to ring India for help.

[mickk]

Cold said:

Those doors at the supermarket that open by themselves when you get close.

It's like being on bloomin' Star Trek.

Do you make the shooosh noise as they open?

[21TonyK]

StanleyT said:

As my IT guy at work says "lazy programming". He should know, his response to "why are our corporate laptops so slow" (run at 5.5 GB Ram and 100% CPU for a while after boot) is "bloatware and idle programmers". The processing power of the control and information systems of the entire UK North Sea rigs when each field was commissioned is cumulatively less that a standard Dell desktop is now. And fortunately, crashed less. And, didn't have to ring India for help.

And he was right. I struggle to comprehend just how much storage current s/w needs. How much of that is redundant or just dormant code?

[Blib]

Right this minute, live from the International Space Station to my London sofa.

[bmwmike]

21TonyK said:

StanleyT said:

As my IT guy at work says "lazy programming". He should know, his response to "why are our corporate laptops so slow" (run at 5.5 GB Ram and 100% CPU for a while after boot) is "bloatware and idle programmers". The processing power of the control and information systems of the entire UK North Sea rigs when each field was commissioned is cumulatively less that a standard Dell desktop is now. And fortunately, crashed less. And, didn't have to ring India for help.

And he was right. I struggle to comprehend just how much storage current s/w needs. How much of that is redundant or just dormant code?

Yep.. and what's the carbon impact of that crappy code globally. Significant, I bet. Not just in desktops and mobiles but it's already running on wifi enabled craptronics like wifi ceiling lamps etc.

[anonymous-user]

Via echo dot, play anything on Spotify through Sonus speakers.
Bonkers how it all works so well.

Also IPAD, pure science fiction to a 60s child

[Piersman2]

StanleyT said:

48k said:

The fact that a Space Shuttle Orbiter could be in space travelling at over 17000mph and an hour later have found and landed on a runway 3 miles long using a computer that has 1MB of memory - not even enough to hold a single photo on my mobile phone. Boggles my mind every time I think about it.

As my IT guy at work says "lazy programming". He should know, his response to "why are our corporate laptops so slow" (run at 5.5 GB Ram and 100% CPU for a while after boot) is "bloatware and idle programmers". The processing power of the control and information systems of the entire UK North Sea rigs when each field was commissioned is cumulatively less that a standard Dell desktop is now. And fortunately, crashed less. And, didn't have to ring India for help.

This reminds me of my very first job... as a computer technician for offshore data logging computers. Each cabinet had 4 floppy disc drives installed , most were at 5.25" but we still had a few coming back in from far flung locations with 8" drives fitted. This limited the software guys upstairs to coding to a programme size limit if 340k (IIRC) as that's all they had on a floppy.

Then one day one of the software guys came down with this black brick in his hand and was cock-a-hoop as they had been playing with a hard disc and had so much space on it they didn't know what to do with it all. Yep, 10MB of hard disc. From that point on our computer had 1 hard disc and two floppies when they went out and the software guys started writing programmes where space was not an issue!

[Piersman2]

Another one for me from those days was the start of the use of modems and remote comms.

I was working in Brunei but one of our guys offshore in the North Sea was having a problem running the planning system I'd set up for him. So... I connected to the phone in the Brunei office via modem, dialled into a citrix PC set up back in the Aberdeen office, then used the remote access comms to look at the citrix PC he was connected to from the offshore platform and was able to take control of his machine whilst he was watching me in real time (well, allowing for data lags due to the slow links anyways).

I was impressed it all hung together, his brain just about blew up when I took over his offshore screen and typed 'Hello Malcom, Piersman here" into his dos prompt. He knew I was in Brunei and in no way expected to be getting any assistance until I got back to base in a weeks time.

Edited by Piersman2 on Wednesday 20th February 23:25

[Gary C]

Well, just restoring an old Apple II europlus. One of the stems on the keyboard has broken and they are as rare as hens teeth. Found a supply in the US, but postage is £20

So, downloaded designspark mechanical and created a 3D model, uploaded to 3D Hubs print service and 100 ABS units for £20, amazing. Same price and units to sell on if I want.

You can even have parts in titanium, stainless or Alu.

Tech, amazing

[Hazuki]

thebraketester said:

Bit of a different one but what amazes me is that between the early/mid 90s and ~2000 we went from having 66Mhz to roughly 1Ghz processors.

Yet 19 years on the fastest in terms of clock speed is only about 3.5Ghz. I know it’s not just about clock speed but I would have thought we would be tuning much higher clock speeds by now.

Off topic, but hopefully interesting to you. A processor at it's base level is full of tiny transistors which combined, create 'logical gates'. The processor's clock speed is largely defined on how fast transistors switch themselves on and off without failing. More transistors = faster speeds.

Processors have largely kept the same footprint over the last 20 years, but as transistors have been getting smaller and smaller, speeds have been almost doubling every 1-2 years (Google Moore's Law). In 2003, Intel's Pentium 4 Processor had approximately 170 million transistors - compared to the 4.5 billion transistors from an Intel Xeon Processor from the last 5 years... all in an area the size of an After-Eight mint.

The problem is, we've gone as small as we can safely go without it becoming inefficient and overheating the processor. The smaller the transistors get, the smaller the insulating portions of the chip become - down to a few hundred atoms. This means electrons have the ability to fire straight through without getting slowed down, causing the transistor to overvolt and fail. You'll see on YouTube that some people have taken to using Liquid Nitrogen on processors, and overvolting them manually but can only get to around 9GHz before it crashes even when cooled to -190c. (You can read more information on the limits if you Google 'Quantum Tunneling in Processors'.)

We now see bigger gains and advancements by multi threaded / multi-cored processors instead of just increasing the clock speed. A 1.5ghz quad core processor would run rings around single core 3.5ghz processor in everyday applications.