Legal documents are highly compressible, right? I mean, 65 people’s worth of compressed documents… Legal documents… The entropy can’t possibly be all that much can it?
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The first hard drive I had to work with, mid-to-late 90s was a 5Mb drive. It was awesome, because I could load multiple-disk (5.25 in) Sierra games onto it and not have to swap disks all the time (Sierra games seemed to work the best with the IBM emulation the computer used… even then, every 20 screen changes or so required a a reboot to prevent a crash).
Now, I carry a great many times that on my keychain. My, how times have changed…
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“mid-to-late 90s… 5Mb drive”
Must have been the 1890s.
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Hah, sure. But, once I was in college I did get into larger drives… and Jaz drives, which were the shit (as long as you didn’t need fast access).
I still have a Jaz drive somewhere, but don’t have the parallel port to use it any more…
You’re right, sort of. It was all just a script spewing out random important-sounding words in a formatted way. It’s not like the USPTO actually ever read any of that stuff.
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I didn’t mean to be dismissive at all. I just thought, you know, compared to something like a news paper, or a publisher, or something like that, legal documents would have less entropy, since they always have to be strictly written to a template, use a limited legalese, and there can be hundreds or thousands of identical documents with nothing different except the names and dates…
But come to think of it, back in the mid 90s, I wouldn’t be surprised if the definition of a “computerized legal document” would be a scanned TIF or JPEG of a typewritten document.
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Can you tell us how long that 5 gig array really lasted?
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I can’t recall, but I think we were still using the NAS several years later when I left the company, but we’d added several similar arrays to augment it. I do recall having to send nagging messages out to users not long after we installed it, asking them to delete their old email because it was chewing up too much space.
But LDoBe is right. By the time I left the company, we’d implemented a document assembly system that would generate all the legal documents from standardized templates, and rather than storing the same forms over and over, we just saved the unique data and automatically squirted it into the forms on demand.
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Nobody will ever need more than 640K of RAM or … what’s the upper limit on a FAT filesystem? Not FAT32, just plain FAT16.
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For FAT16B (final version), 16 GB (with 256 KB clusters and 2 or 4 KB sectors) (NT 4 and later)
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I kinda don’t get why drives with FireWire are so rare. 
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Back when I was a kid we had to walk three miles through two foot deep drifts of data cassettes to go to computer camp. Between the bits and bytes we were never sure if the difference made a difference.
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Complexity is the enemy of reliability.
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Sure thing!
Open your javascript console and paste in
document.getElementById('priceblock_ourprice').innerHTML = "$82.00"
When you get your credit card bill, you’ll want to do a similar thing (or use whiteout and a typewriter if it’s a paper bill).
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5400rpm? 7200rpm? do they say?
Oh yeah, I know where he’s coming from–I remember when being able to get a 16K expansion for my Apple II for only $15 was a really great deal. I also remember those drives with the removable stacks of 14" platters. And doing my Fortran homework on Decwriters…yeah, I’m old.
WD has been trying to get rid of those 3TB green drives for a while now. I’ve had 3 so far. None have made it past 4 months.
I, too, have yet to find backup software as convenient and easy to use as just copying my user directory straight to a drive. Though, this method does hiccup when I change the structure of the subdirectories. I’ve been looking for a smart backup solution, that doesn’t insist on backing up all of my OS, with its myriad files of garbage, or using some odd monolithic compressed file that I can’t access quickly and without the use of special software.
in the late 70s my last couple of years in high school we did a computer science course which still used punched cards or mapo cards (used by the University of Manitoba) which you marked with a pencil.
You wrote the program on paper, then transferred it to cards (either by handmarking the mapo cards, or if you got lucky using the card punch terminal which the high school used for their data).
The programs were run over the phone at the University of Manitoba computer, I remember thinking how hilarious it was when I got an “illegal command” or something.
One of the school teachers, who was a hobbyist, brought in his TRS80 computer which was basically a fat keyboard which you hooked up to a small tv and the programs were loaded using a cassette reader. This was like 1978.
We got to play with some of the programs, which were all text based. One was like Sargon or Kingdom or something, essentially a turn based simulation of an overlord, you allocate x amount of grain to feed the people or hire mercenaries etc. Some times you have a bad crop or you get invaded or the people revolt.
Another one was moon landing, where you control the amount of fuel /thrust in a landing appollo capsule, which slows you down until you are at a safe speed to land, too much thrust may put you back up, not enough and you crash and of course you may run out of fuel if you use too much. Also turn based.
First year computer science we also used punched cards. I remember saving a word processing program in PL1 onto punched cards, as if I was ever going to use it.
But in terms of ancient history, one of our profs who was around in the early days of the computer age, the late 40s mentioned that often the programs were hardwired on a grid and he only had so much time in his slot to use the computer. He mentioned doing a program to invert a 40x40 matrix and then having to dismantle it when his time was up.
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I remember also having a heated discussion with another student who was a “gamer” and I said it will be great when you can do video games that are close to life like simulation.
At this time I recall doing a computer graphics course and all the math involved in the display methods, either using small polygons or ray tracing. This is a short realistic (for the time) computer animation took an hour to generate a frame even on supercomputers at the time.
So my gamer friend was skeptical that life like simulation will ever happen because of the computation involved and the slow speed of the computers at the time. His contention was that the video games that were fast at the time was because they were hardwired into a cartridge.
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