Thursday, March 22, 2007

What programming was like 40 years ago

I worked as a computer programmer nearly 40 years ago. I developed accounting, inventory and management reports for a large trading house.

The main frame computer had a memory of 32,000 bytes and a disk storage capacity of 4 megabytes. The computer system cost about 100 years of my salary. My special skill was to use the limited resource effectively.

Today, a personal computer costing $1,500 (ie half a month's salary of a programmer) has a memory of 500 megabytes (ie 1,500 times of 32K bytes) and a disk storage capacity of 90 Gbytes (ie 20,000 times of 4 megabytes).

How times have changed.

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