I think I had that one, too.
The TRS-80 was really noisy (in the electronic sense). There were a couple of programs that said to place an AM radio near the computer and tune it to a certain frequency. The noise from inside the computer would provide sound effects (e.g., a slot machine turning) via the AM radio.
Macs are, still, a smallish percentage of computers out there. And Apple mostly dropped FireWire (like itâs hot) in favor of Thunderbolt so itâs only going to get worse. Anything else?
Sadly, TB drives cost A MILLION DOLLARS so it seems most of us are stuck with USB, like it or not.
Contemporary PCs do it a lot. Pretty much all computers do it a lot, and it has security implications. Cue TEMPEST.
I may be misrememebring that the Model I was worse than other computers (or electronics) in this regard. According to Wikipedia, what happened was that the FCCâs new RF restrictions went into effect after the Model I debuted, and Tandy discontinued it.
Itâs either 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm, at their discretion. You might get really lucky and receive an ultraqueit energy sipping 4200 rpm model.
Itâs similar to Dell. Dude, youâre getting whatever Dell decides is most cost effective this month!
No, because I am not getting.
Thereâs also eSATA. which can be converted into thunderbolt relatively easily, if not quite as affordably as the average punter would like.
Because Apple knows youâll buy the new thing when they tell you.
Good to know. Do you know if converted eSATA > thunderbolt would have any improvement in transfer speed or latency compared to USB3? Or itâs just convenient for when you run out of other ports?
THIS. The price adjust robots try and squeeze the most profit possible out of items.
I have a stash like that. Mostly the small cards that i never used because i almost always put the biggest chip i can into anything. The still wrapped 256mb sony memory stick sure is a pretty blue-purple, i better hang onto it even though i donât have any device that can use it and the size is patheticâŚyou never know.
see if you can make sense of this test.
http://barefeats.com/hard153.html
USB 3.0 is fine for a hard drive; for an SSD, or RAID, perhaps there are advantages to the other interfaces,
(and since eSATA only is 3GB/s, the efficiency advantages would have to be enormous.)
Itâs probably an intellipower drive, which is all WDC drives that donât explicitly list their RPM.
IIRC, Intellipower drives all are either 5400 or 4200 RPM, and Western Digital insists theyâre just as fast as 7200 RPM drives, because magic and caching.
Basically, they say theyâre green (which they are, relatively speaking), except, all the hard disks turn themselves off when not in use, just like Intellipower drives.
Itâs basically a way to sell inferior equipment at the same price-point as something decent.
The spindowns and spinups can be pretty hard on the heads and bearings. The temperature cycling related to the power on/off cycles is also hard at the materials and parts.
Screw green. Give me reliable.
You and @shaddack might enjoy this review.
WD Green Power: A New Benchmark in HDD Acoustics & Power.
We were able to confirm that our 750 GB Green Power had a spindle speed of 5,400 RPM by analyzing its sound spectrum. Why sound? Sound is vibration; the pitch of the sound corresponds to the frequency of the vibration. Hard drives vibrate at the speed of their motor, so they produce a noise at the same frequency as their rotation speed. Our sample had a sharp spike at exactly 90 Hz (cycles per second). Multiplying that number by 60 (to get cycles per minute) yielded a measured rotation speed of 5,400 RPM.
I got a 10meg HP hard drive, about 50 pounds, sitting in my basement as âpaperweightâ 
Do I remember those times, A hard drive was a treasure to be handled with extreme care
âInstead of bobcat box contained um⌠well, the box contained Bob Newhart.â
The issue with size of legal documents isnât compressibility - itâs file format bloat. Back in 1985, the file formatting would be simple markup, probably with WordPerfect or WordStar, maybe adding 10% to the size of the text, and the text compresses by 3:1-4:1, if you stored things with ZIP. Todayâs file formats are likely to be much larger (even machine-produced HTML is usually bloated), but still much smaller with Word than with PowerPoint.
Thanks.
Iâve got a 3TB Seagate drive with important data on. Iâm looking for a replacement now.
OpenDocument files are already compressed with zip. I donât know about Microsoftâs OpenXML though
Iâve been using computers a bit over 40 years, starting with PDP-11s that I donât know the prices for. I lost track of when the price-performance ratio had changed by a factor of a million; itâs well over that now depending on whether you count disk, RAM, or CPU. My ~1983 VAX cost about $400K, with 1 MIPS of CPU, 4M of RAM, 1GB of removable disk (which was about $120K of the cost.)
A Raspberry Pi costs about $40, and does about 500 VAX MIPS, so price-performance is about 5M times as fast. For a PC, 4GB RAM is about $40, compared to about $40K for the 4MB in that VAX, so about 1M:1. Disk? $30/TB vs $120K/GB is about 4M, not counting the speed increase. My ~$1K laptop gets 10K BogoMIPS/core, so if you count 8 cores and ignore the GPU, thatâs 80K times as fast, for 1/400th of the money, so 32M:1 for CPU.
But what are the social implications of this? We used to worry about computers and privacy back in the 60s, when the people who might want to track us had machines that used punch cards, cost $1M, and needed a department of 20-50 people to keep them running and fed with data, and designing a new database query took 6 months of programming. By a decade or more ago, a random government employee could type a query on their desktop PC on a whim at lunchtime and get far more information out of it, serious advertisers could track far more about you, and by now the NSAâs tracking âoh, itâs just metadataâ from mobile phones that everybody carries that show everywhere youâve been.
David Brinâs book âThe Transparent Societyâ was almost 20 years ago. Itâs gotten a lot scarier since then, though people are now carrying video recorders in their pocket that can watch the police, as he suggested we should work on doing back then, and itâs starting to have positive social effects to balance some of the negatives. A bit.
