Micron flashes flashy 16-nanometer flash memory

Don't know when yer well off!

When I were a lad in the sixties, I worked for a while at Moody's as a junior financial reporter, we used to take press releases off the Reuters teleprinter and calculate share yields with a slide rule, I could run the stats for a daily update card at a rate of one every ten to fifteen minutes, that is three or four calculations and snopaking an old card and adding in the new info' to go to the print shop .

The boss's pet sat in a corner with the latest Anita electronic calculator that had LEDs that looked like Robby the Robot's head and amazingly could calculate to eight decimal places.

The most intriguing pieces of equipment were some old pre-war calculators that were wholly mechanical, had wheels and little windows with numbers and a winding handle like a winch.

I never learned to use one but a couple of the old hands who looked as though they had been there since Dickens' day would use nothing else.

Combined I suppose the whole office had less computing power than a cheap phone.

When the weather was really cold in winter we used to get to hold the piece of company coal for a couple of minutes! I tried lighting it once but I think it was a bit of stone painted black.

PDP-8 disk drive

Yes, it was about 20" x 30" x 14" high, and it held .....

... 48K bytes in 1969, hooked up to the Choate School's new PDP-8 with FOUR teletypes, and a high speed paper tape reader (300 chars per second) and punch (50 chars per second). The main CPU had 12K bytes of CORE memory.

To start it up, you had to use the front panel keys to toggle in a boot loader to read the startup from the tape drive, which then booted from the Disk...

Wow