PDA

View Full Version : I love computer improvements!



Traab
2013-08-24, 08:04 AM
Rofl. I cant believe this, but I had a recent moment of panic. See, here I am, downloading Marvel Heroes, when I suddenly see the rather massive size of the patches I need to instal. I panicked because I thought I still had a 200 gig hard drive and I already have several MMOs on there. I forgot that I had recently upgraded to a 1k gig hard drive.

It did give me interesting flashbacks though. I still remember the good old days when diablo 2 was brand new, and my computer had a MASSIVE hard drive of 7 gigs on it. It had gotten to the point where if I wanted to do a full instal of d2, cinematics and all, i would have to erase other games to make room. I spent a lot of time juggling what was installed and what was removed as my interests kept changing. Then I got a 70 gig harddrive and thought, "WOW! I will NEVER be able to fill up that much! Then I started reading system requirements for new games and my head kept meeting my desk.

A few years later I upgraded to the 200 gig had and for a time I was content. I didnt play a lot of huge games so I had plenty of space. then I decided, "You know what? I am curious about all these now f2p mmo games out there, and I want to try them." Luckily shortly after then, I needed to replace a few items on my computer and my uncle, who builds these things for a living said, "Hey Traab, (He calls me traab) you know I could toss in a 1k gig hard drive for you. Its actually fairly cheap to do." And here we are today. I just double checked and saw I still have hundreds of gigs left to play with. YAY! Personally, I cant wait to see the day when the average game takes up hundreds of gigs each. I wonder what they will look like?

Erloas
2013-08-24, 10:20 AM
Usually 1k gig is just referred to as a TB or terabyte. :smallwink:

Of course you can tell how long someone has been using computers by how big hard drives were when they were younger. I'm trying to remember if my first computer had a 20 or 40MB hard drive. I used to have to uninstall Windows 3.1 if I wanted to install certain games.

And my friend had an (already old) Commodore 64 that didn't even have a hard drive.

Mando Knight
2013-08-24, 10:26 AM
Of course you can tell how long someone has been using computers by how big hard drives were when they were younger. I'm trying to remember if my first computer had a 20 or 40MB hard drive. I used to have to uninstall Windows 3.1 if I wanted to install certain games.

When people were able to actually fit things on 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies...
...when CD-ROM drives were the new-fangled thing...

Douglas
2013-08-24, 12:24 PM
When people were able to actually fit things on 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies...
...when CD-ROM drives were the new-fangled thing...
I remember when upgrading the family computer from 4 MB RAM to 8 MB was a big deal.

Now I'm idly wondering when RAM chips will hit the terabyte mark.

Gnoman
2013-08-24, 12:30 PM
And my friend had an (already old) Commodore 64 that didn't even have a hard drive.

You had 128Kb floppies on those.

Bounty Hunter
2013-08-24, 12:45 PM
"Back in my day...


*waves cane*

factotum
2013-08-24, 01:08 PM
Of course you can tell how long someone has been using computers by how big hard drives were when they were younger. I'm trying to remember if my first computer had a 20 or 40MB hard drive.

The first computer that I owned which actually *had* a hard drive was a PC with 120Mb that I bought when I was 23. Heck, I remember being astounded when I bought my Amiga 500 because games loaded so quickly from floppy disc compared to the tape drive on my old Spectrum!

Weird thing is, I reckon the games out today take *longer* to load than those old Amiga ones did--yes, the hard drive they're loading off is several orders of magnitude faster than the old floppies, but the games themselves are so much bigger that it counteracts that. That's why I think games won't get much bigger than they are now until SSDs become cheap enough that everyone has them, because it just takes too long to load everything in otherwise.

Traab
2013-08-24, 01:10 PM
Usually 1k gig is just referred to as a TB or terabyte. :smallwink:

Of course you can tell how long someone has been using computers by how big hard drives were when they were younger. I'm trying to remember if my first computer had a 20 or 40MB hard drive. I used to have to uninstall Windows 3.1 if I wanted to install certain games.

And my friend had an (already old) Commodore 64 that didn't even have a hard drive.

Yeah for me, the earliest computer I can remember was my good old 386 pentium processor. Oh man did I love my dial up with a whopping 1-7 kbps download rate. I THINK it had a gig hard drive, but it may have been less, like 700 megs or something. I had one that was even worse, but damned if I can recall its stats as it was basically a glorified typewriter for me for school assignments. (my handwriting sucked lol. )

Grinner
2013-08-24, 01:27 PM
Personally, I cant wait to see the day when the average game takes up hundreds of gigs each. I wonder what they will look like?


When people were able to actually fit things on 3.5" 1.44 MB floppies...
...when CD-ROM drives were the new-fangled thing...

I remember once reading an article which noted that whenever a new, higher capacity medium is phased in, game developers make every effort to fill every last byte. I'm continually surprised by how bloated developers can make their games, and I have to wonder where it all goes.

Emmerask
2013-08-24, 01:41 PM
I remember once reading an article which noted that whenever a new, higher capacity medium is phased in, game developers make every effort to fill every last byte. I'm continually surprised by how bloated developers can make their games, and I have to wonder where it all goes.

well higher res textures can take multiple gb alone, uncompressed high quality soundfiles too and then video files oh and i nearly forgot, 3dobjects and animations take up a good amount of space too.

the coding itself while more complex and generally more is really nothing to speak of space wise.

warty goblin
2013-08-24, 02:06 PM
Although I wouldn't say most games have been growing all that rapidly over the last five years or so. Five to eight or ten gigs seems to cover most of 'em, with only a few getting much over that.

tomandtish
2013-08-24, 02:58 PM
Yep. I remember when my parents brought home a 20MB hard drive. General consensus was "How the heck are we ever gonna fill 20MB?

Knaight
2013-08-24, 03:04 PM
I remember when upgrading the family computer from 4 MB RAM to 8 MB was a big deal.

Now I'm idly wondering when RAM chips will hit the terabyte mark.

I remember something similar for video cards, where we had a 4 MB one, and couldn't use things that required an 8 MB one. By now, the high end is measured in GB.

factotum
2013-08-24, 04:22 PM
I remember upgrading the graphics card in that first PC I had from 256k to 512k of RAM so I could run at 800x600 resolution--had to buy the chips and insert them into the carriers on the card! The entire machine had only 4Mb of RAM, and a 40MHz 386SX CPU.

Brother Oni
2013-08-25, 05:10 AM
I can't be the only person who had a computer where the available space for saving stuff was easily doubled by flipping over the cassette. :smalltongue:

Fri
2013-08-25, 05:45 AM
http://imageshack.us/a/img822/1231/10mbharddrive.jpg

Flickerdart
2013-08-25, 03:36 PM
I miss the days when you could use words like "subsystem" and "controller buffer" in tech advertisements, with none of this "magical" and "revolutionary" nonsense.

Traab
2013-08-25, 03:48 PM
I miss the days when you could use words like "subsystem" and "controller buffer" in tech advertisements, with none of this "magical" and "revolutionary" nonsense.

You mean back when computers were solely the province of scientists and the highest tier of techno geeks?

Flickerdart
2013-08-25, 04:36 PM
You mean back when computers were solely the province of scientists and the highest tier of techno geeks?
Back then, being a techno geek actually meant something, gorram it!

tomandtish
2013-08-25, 06:26 PM
I can't be the only person who had a computer where the available space for saving stuff was easily doubled by flipping over the cassette. :smalltongue:

Remember taking the old single sided 5 1/4 floppies and making them double sided with carful use of a hole punch?

Then we had shrinkage (http://http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html) and dropped to 3 1/2 inches...... :smallbiggrin:

factotum
2013-08-26, 01:15 AM
I can't be the only person who had a computer where the available space for saving stuff was easily doubled by flipping over the cassette. :smalltongue:

Er, no you're not, I already mentioned having a Spectrum with a cassette player several posts above yours. :smallamused:

Brother Oni
2013-08-26, 03:05 AM
Er, no you're not, I already mentioned having a Spectrum with a cassette player several posts above yours. :smallamused:

Well aside from you - you having a Speccy was a given. :smalltongue: