Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 05, 2021

She must’ve meant terabytes, not gigabytes.

Bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha!

Gawd! Then I pinched my iPad to magnify today’s strip – 1995. Okay, this makes sense. Maybe Mike will surprise his daughter with a Nintendo Virtual Boy.

At last, we got rid of that sleazebag named Duke, and his delinquent kid!!!

Sheesh! Kids these days. Why can’t they be satisfied with a Commodore 64?

“64k!?! Who needs that much space? You’ll never fill it up" and “Eh, don’t worry ‘bout it. Disk space is like closet space – mostly used for storing junk you’ll never, ever need again.”

So who else can remember when they “first went Pentium”?

Interesting that they’d choose a Christmas rerun in April.

Our smartwatches probably have more computing power than that old dinosaur! 133Mhz! That is practically an Abacus these days…

This is making me feel both old and tech-savvy, strange.

how about a video disk system….it’s the technology that’s here to stay

Intel missed a good bet by not following up Pentium with Sexium. Would put a different spin on Intel Inside. :-)

If she only knew…

640K is Enough For Anyone

I remember the change well, my first copy of Win 95 came on 13 disks…lol When we got to Pentiums it was wow, what a difference.

Didn’t Bill Gates say something like, “125Kb should be enough for anybody” in the early 80’s somewhere? |I do remember my parents getting our first PC in the mid 80’s somewhere – ’86 or ’87 – and having 4 Mb of RAM was a big deal, at $200 a meg!

If you can get a decade out of a personal computer (or iPhone), you’re a genius!

Anyone else remember the division problem in Pentiums?

Ah yes. The old days when Jedi computer geeks built their own towers from the motherboard up and over clocked and did all that amazing stuff that nobody cared about. I miss those days, but I don’t want to go back.

I can’t remember the exact date, but the first 1gig pc hard drive I ever saw took up two 5.25 drive bays. It was at a computer club meeting, and the owner said it cost $1,000 US.

Isn’t Pentium the chip that did arithmetic incorrectly?

Everyone laughed at me when I bought my Packard Bell with the 810MB hard drive (running Windows for Workgroups 3.11). They said I’d never use all that storage space. Guess who had the last laugh…

as someone who started on DOS 1.0 on the original IBM PC, this has been my story. My memories are outdated.

We just bought new iPads to replace the ones we bought 8 and 9 years ago. All with 128 GB; the new ones cost less than 1/2 the price of the old ones.

I never would have imagined back in those early days that I would now be running a small 22Tb rack system storing all the music of my life, a massive movie/TV show collection, photos and books with the ability to WiFi stream multimedia anywhere in my home and patio. And, that’s not including running my home security network. I blame Radio Shack for selling me that Tandy 100 that I had to build myself because I’ve been addicted to tech ever since. I think it’s because as a kid I fully bought into the visions of the 21st century promised us by people like Rod Serling, Fred Pohl, Jules Verne and all those Tom Swift books I read.

Poppy, at least she’s not asking for another kind of muscle machine, say a Viper with a fiberglass roof.

Ah, those were the days, when a gigabyte really meant something. I was remembering my earliest days when the PC had just come on the scene. I had a Brother Powernote, a dedicated word processor with only 20K of memory. And then there was the Timex Sinclair 2000 and extended memory of 16M. Boy, was that big. My first real PC was a Compaq with 10G of hard drive and I still only used half of it. My current machine is a Gateway with 1T of memory. It was old when I bought it, which probably explained the price, and I’m hoping it’ll last for the rest of life, too.

I think I have a few movies in HD that approach 2.1GB each.

First computer was a Tandy Model 1 level 2 with 16K of memory and you loaded it with a cassette tape. That was replaced by an Apple IIe to which I added a 5 mb external drive that came in a box the size of a foot locker. I am in the process of retiring my 14 year old iMac as I am at the point that none of the software on it is really supported (other than a couple of open source versions) and I am maxing everything out to do a simple task. Don’t have the funds to replace it with another Mac, so I went back to PCs. On a side note, took a year of FORTRAN 2 and FORTRAN 4 and got credit for a year of a foreign language

Oh, how QUAINT!

I recall buying my first computer. It came with a 14.4 modem. When I told the clerk that I wanted a 28.8 modem the clerk told I should be satisfied with 14.4. Years later, with a new computer, I got a faster modem (58?) I thought back to the clerk & 14.4….

Some strips don’t age well, do they?

Today we call that a phone. Of course my first hard drive was 64 Megabytes.

Well, games used to come on a couple of floppy discs or if it was huge, a single CD-ROM. In comparison, the latest patch for Cyberpunk 2077 weighs in a 44 Gigabytes. What’s your internet plan like?

In 1997 a rich relative treated me to my first computer. 200mHZ, 3.8 G hard drive. Yow! Friends were like “Whoa! You got a MEGA-machine!”

No wonder, 1995. :-)

{snicker snicker snicker}

You had bits? We had to use rocks…

This cartoon really shows its age… I remember teaching how to fix computers, and some of the students laughed at some of our older model guinea pig computers, while boasting about the “power” of their own computers at home… I pointed out that, no matter how proud you are of your “powerful” computer today, in just a few years people will be sneering at it because it is outdated…

A Packard Bell? More like Packard Hell. And I remember when a gigabyte hard drive was unbelievably huge. Shoot, I remember saying “Wow! A 20 megabyte hard drive! We’ll never fill that up.”

Uh, you’re kind of talking to Santa, dear, “hints” aren’t really necessary. I mean, she at least sounds like she know The Truth.

I paid $750 for a 40 MEGABYTE hard drive, in 1985.

All this computer geek humor and I’m capable of appreciating almost none of it. Oh well. ;-)

Of course, that was before we discovered that Pentium could not Divide or Conquer.

My first computer was a Tandy TRS80 [aka the Trash 80] with 386 K and tape drives. Yes, K. Not M. Not T. I am SO old….

Something about using “Poppy” as a synonym for “Dad” just…seems somehow off to me, I’m not sure why. Oh well.

Those were the days …

my first was a Tandy T-1000 it still has a home in my closet/original box

I had a Packard Bell for my first system, they were better and far more stable than any other one.