Forget the freak; I'm just nature. - We've come a long way, baby

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...I just finished grading my very last lab report of the semester. Yes, kids, I'm done TAing until January. And that celebratory beer? Yeah, that's turned into a whole bunch of Pumpkin Ales and Magic Hat Circus Boys. What can I say? Hefeweizens are awesome.

In addition to that, in the spirit of coming a long way, I have to share an anecdote from a professor. He was here at UNC - CH in 1970 as a graduate student, and that year, the school bought...a computer. *gasp* It was a massive freaking thing that actually had a huge wheel that you used to cycle through workstations, and it had a whopping 16 kb of memory (yes, 16 kilobytes). Its cost? $80,000. In 1970 dollars. Which, in 2008 dollars, is literally about $447,000. That insane amount of money, just for an amount of memory that could probably be found in a goddamn Guitar Hero controller today - but hey, if you gotta do Fourier transforms, you gotta do Fourier transforms, and you sure as hell aren't going to do them by hand. No other chemistry department had a computer with such a staggering amount of memory for a couple of years.

Oral exam on Friday, final exam on Monday, fly home on Tuesday. And no more bloody grading. Things are lookin' sweet.

Current Music: Primus

	From: susanne_est_moi	Date: November 20th, 2008 08:44 am (UTC)		(Link)

Heh. My father is one of those "computer people," so I've been around them my entire life (which I suppose isn't exactly common, when you consider how old I'm getting).

But anyway, one of my favorite quirks of our house is the Mac Plus that he keeps sitting on the shelf in his office, like a work of art. He treats it as such too. I sit there with my MacBook Pro and can't help but be astounded by how much things have changed in just twenty years.

Then again, he also likes to pull out the slide rule and remind me how lucky I am to have calculators. Ha.

Good luck with the finals!

	From: matrexius	Date: November 20th, 2008 02:09 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I've been around them since, oh, I was about 9. That's when I was introduced to the wonders of the Apple IIe. Not that they aren't phenomenally successful anyway, but it would be really neat to see where Mac would be today if they made their early systems open-hardware - lots of companies were encouraged to develop things for IBM computers, and anyone with a bit of knowledge could tinker around inside them, but Mac didn't do that for some reason.

Speaking of slide rules and exams, by the way, one of the professors here is notorious for forcing people to use slide rules instead of calculators during cumes.

	From: rechercher	Date: November 20th, 2008 12:36 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Programmed with punch cards?

	From: matrexius	Date: November 20th, 2008 02:03 pm (UTC)		(Link)

You know, our prof didn't tell us that. I'll have to ask him. All he told us about the user-interface side of things was that it had a giant wheel that you would rotate (and yeah, it made a clicking sound as it did so) to set which workstation was actually linked to it. It was some kind of Raytheon computer, but he didn't tell us the specific name, and apparently, that company is a defense contractor now.

	From: dementedchicken	Date: November 23rd, 2008 01:34 am (UTC)		(Link)

My professor was telling me about that in my C++ course. When talking about programming practices, he let us know that a few really clever but confusing memory management tricks, though still used by senior programmers in the habit of using them, are pretty antiquated now because of the amount of memory on current computers. Back then, they had to fight tooth and nail to make use of every last byte of memory.

	From: matrexius	Date: November 23rd, 2008 04:35 am (UTC)		(Link)

I remember that my first computer (a Compaq Presario, heh) had a 500 MB hard drive and something like 16 MB of RAM, and that was a lot for that time period. Now, you can barely buy a computer with less than a gig of RAM, hard drives are in the TB regime, and they're even starting to release solid-state hard drives. I fucking love technology.

And C++? We use LabVIEW 'round these parts, mister.

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