3.5 floppy disks. They still exist and still get used. I used them regularly up through the 2010s.
Are they still used for something that isn’t ancient hardware?
There is a surprising amount of “ancient” hardware out there still chugging along doing very useful work.
CT and MRI
i saw this on r/futurology
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/science/article/3367612/chinese-scientists-build-worlds-smallest-ct-scanner-weighing-just-6kg“The device can be held in one hand and is the world’s smallest and lightest CT system, earning it the nickname ‘palm-sized CT scanner’,” Liu Baodong, a senior engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and general manager of Rayim, told the Science and Technology Daily on Monday.
The machine had a spatial resolution of 80 micrometres, roughly the width of a human hair, and could analyse objects from snail shells to medicine capsules, Liu said.
It consumed only about 200 watts, which meant it could be powered by an ordinary portable power bank during fieldwork, he said."
This is the hot shit as well:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon-counting_computed_tomography
this even blows my mind from a 2020 nerd perspective.
Yeah MicroSD should’ve been replaced eons ago.
With what?
According to cellphone companies, apparently non-removable storage
At least Johnny Mnemonic hasn’t happened yet… although Neuralink seems to be trying.
I’m sure Neuralink will only be used in the most responsible ways possible. Fitness trackers are a great example of… Okay I can’t do the sarcasm, the “wellness” industry is evil
MicroSD express.
Nintendo Switch 2 is the only device I know uses it. Steam deck/machine needs it desperately. It would give similar performance to internal storage for cell phones.
Vr is pretty damn cool IMO, also emulation.
The fact almost any computer after 2010 ish can basically play every single game made for every console ever up to probably ps1/ps2, is insane.
The fact any computer can mimic any other computer (given enough computing power) is a mathematical fact of life. Said like this, it does sound pretty surreal.
Imagine showing VR porn games to Benjamin Franklin.
He’d never get anything done.
I’m still amazed by the fact that PS2 was backwards compatible with PS1 cause it had a PS1 module inside. Also, PS2 super slim was way too sleek, even for today’s standards
Yeah ps2 is just great. Still play it all the time.
Mine broke unfortunately
What broke, the laser ? Very easy fix
I think the tape that connects the laser. But it broken 12 years ago, I don’t have it anymore
a lot of consoles did this actually! for example, the 3DS contains a DS, which in turn contains a GBA. the Wii U contains a Wii, which contains a GameCube.
What you said reminds me of this:
https://cheezburger.com/6923525/guys-impossible-garage-sale-find-is-one-for-the-books
using the PS1 CPU as the I/O processor when in PS2 mode, no less.
I’d imagine someone living in the 70s during the insanely fast computer power progress would have no problem believing that a newer system could emulate older system’s code… Wouldn’t be surprised that it was already happening back then.
Yep, for example, emulation was being used at IBM in the late 60’s (and a descendant of it is still in use today, called z/VM): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CP/CMS
IIRC Alan Turing was the one who came up with the concept of emulation, so that’s nothing new.
Damn, really? Dude was a treasure. And we treated him like shit.
I recently bought a JBL Trio everything in one box music thing.
It has the ability in almost real time, there’s a bit of buffering, to unmix any music I stream to it from my phone. You can dial out vocals, the guitar, drums, etc.
Being able to separate the tracks in audio, let alone do it in basically real time, would have seemed like black magic in the 70s. Hell, it seems like black magic now.
Personally, I’d go with 80s/90s nerds, as it would take a special kind of 70s nerd to understand digital storage enough to be wowed by a 4tb sd card.
Multi-gigabit network speeds being common in people’s homes. 400mbps+ wifi speeds being common too.
4KUHD tvs and on your phone. Small B&W crt tvs were extremely common.
Bluetooth headphones, cords were a pain.
The more I say, the more I think, basically everything.
I just did the math on network speed the other day. I remember our local dial up ISP upgrading to 56k from 28.8 and it blew me away, although I rarely connected above 33.6. I’m currently on 1200 mbps, nearly 23,000 times faster than 56kbps and about 37,000x faster than the 33.6 I actually received.
I can transfer in one second what took about 10 hours before. A movie I just watched would have taken over 95 days to download at 90s speeds.
My boy experienced lag for the first time about a year ago while playing fortnite. Another player was rubber banding about the place.
He looks at me and says “bro why is our internet so bad?”
I was legitimately amazed that he’d never seen that happen before, and equally surprised that I’d just sort of forgotten about it myself.
Lag…you don’t know lad till you tried playing Quake online from New Zealand (that place that is often left off maps)…in the late 90’s.
I scoff at your 200ms ping, try 4500ms (on a good day); that is right, you spot turn and shoot. Three and a half seconds later you die; because you shot at empty space and someone saw you.
Yet now, basic websites take longer to load! Lol
For a reminder of how quick it could be :
That website makes me feel seen.
Best site ever made! Haven’t seen that one topped yet.
Not difficult to top, since it looks like nineties’ shitty typography, but with a sans-serif typeface. The way better example is Butterick’s Practical Typography.
Love it! The main reason I use reader modes in browsers is so that they look like that website.
I regularly work with 800Gbps Ethernet at work
That image has gotta be fake, right?
SDHC only goes up to 32GB and I’m pretty sure the successor SDXC only goes up to 2TB
I’m not quite sure how a card can be both U1 and U3 too
SD express should be able to surpass 2TB, but I don’t know if 4TB micro SD express cards have been made yet
SDUC can get up to 128TB btw
Has an SD card with 4tb ever been produced? Idk and i doubt
You are 100% correct, there is no such thing as a 4TB SD card. Largest you can get is 2TB. Western Digital has shown a 4TB MicroSDUC and even 8TB SDUC card at shows and events, but I don’t think it has found its way into production just yet. And with the extreme prices of flash these days, I doubt they will release it any time soon. The 4TB card would probably be $1500 - $2000 retail, who is going to buy that? And what is the use case?
The picture is some mockup someone made or maybe AI generated, but not of a real card.
It could be a real card from Temu. It’s actually a 1 GB card, but it says it’s 4TB.
You can actually store 4TB on most those cards (if you’re ok with automated data deletion to make room)
Yep. It’s a “write once, read never” storage medium.
WORM/WORN, small difference, I say ship it.
This guy’s got upper management written all over him.
/dev/null is the ultimate storage solution. You can write infinite bytes to it and it’ll never get full or wear out!
Very fast, too!
A friend bought a USB stick that had some amazing data size for the era for a cheap price, turned out it ran some sort of zip tool interface and compressed the data
No one claimed the compression algorithm was lossless! Everything fits inside a single bit if you squint
They can print whatever size they want on it if you’re buying from AliExpress 🤪
Back in early days of Aliexpress, I was looking at a bike frame by Trek. I messaged the shop and ask if they stock Specialized as well. Shop replied “Yes, of course we can put whatever decals you want on it”.
Led mouse instead of trackball/mechanical mouse.
Or having a mouse at all. Even in the late 80’s, mice were a luxury item. And those horrible resistive touch screens in the auto parts store were a nightmare compared to today’s capacitive phone screens.
Light pens were cool, though.
Yeah I paid $60 for a mouse in 1984/1985. My friend borrowed it to try it out and a few weeks later his mom got rid of his computer along with my mouse. Nooooooo!
i might get shade for it, but LLMs.
Nah, in the '70s they expected us to have stuff way better than LLMs by now.
I remember reading in the 80’s, can’t remember where (this 60’s Time-Life book series, maybe? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_Science_Library), where they were discussing the latest advances in training neural nets, and the idea that with a big enough net they could simulate the human brain. Maybe those Time books are on archive.org, I’ll have to look for them sometime.
On Wikipedia it seems that research dates back to the 40’s, but work was definitely in progress in the 50’s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_network_(machine_learning)
So for us old farts, LLMs (even though it’s different technology obviously) seem more like “finally” because since Eliza we’ve been hearing and dreaming about it for ages. Too bad that the reality of them is so dark! And every movie and show tried to warn us: 2001 A Space Odyssey, The Ultimate Computer (Star Trek TOS), TRON, Terminator 2… but we thought “nah, that’s just the movies”.
We went from dumb terminals to personal computers, now were back to dumb terminals
When I was a child my parents worried that microwave ovens would make their own food toxic, and told me TV would ruin my eyes. Now they sleep with a wireless super computer plugged in to a world wide-network, with a camera and lidar pointed at themselves around the clock.
What lidar device is pointing at them?
TIL, iPhones have lidar…
Cloud services in general. Tech used to all be local, regardless of what it was. Everything cloud would blow the minds of people from the 70s. Though, we all know the tradeoffs these days
I might be misunderstanding, but dumb terminals are super old, dating back to the 60s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datapoint_3300). The idea of having your own personal computer, rather than time sharing, was very exciting to people. Like the Apple computer kit in the 70s, and the IBM PC in the early 80s. People wanted their own computer rather than having to rely on and pay for those centralized services. So I’d say that cloud services are more like a return to the bad old days rather than some exciting prospect.
Terminals existed in libraries even in the early 80s, probably earlier than that, to replace the card catalog. And to my knowledge each library didn’t have a minicomputer or mainframe in it, as that would have been way too expensive. I think they were probably using either dial up or some kind of old connection to a mainframe in the city, but I’m just speculating.
Cameras in general. Good quality film cameras took some work and were heavy. Like bookbag heavy. You’d have to carry a little set of filters (thin lens caps that screwed onto the main lens) in addition to another lens or two to get a good range of options. Now, tap, done. Copies? NP. Black and white? Tap. No need to use up the roll of color film and then switch to black and white film.
And modern mid-range photo cameras come with crazy features. Autofocus that can detect human and even animal eyes and instantly focus on those. Lenses with whisper-quiet and crazy fast ultrasonic focusing motors. Image stabilization both in the lens and in the camera.
Oh, and your photo camera can record video, too, because why wouldn’t it?
Remember vid cams way back? On the shoulder with VHS tapes.
Can’t wait for this revolution in wildlife photography.
Having a portable device that can play any song you want still blows my mind. I had a Walkman as a kid and thought that was great but being able to listen to anything at the touch of a button is so next level
