I started with Apple Basic and 6502 machine code and Assembly, then went onto Fortran, Pascal, C, Lisp (Scheme), microcode, Perl, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP, and Objective-C.
Originally, I was going to go with an Atari... but it was a big expense for my family... and after months of me nagging, my dad agreed to buy an Apple ][. The few months in childhood seem to last forever. A few months nowadays seem to pass like days. Those days, a computer had 16kb or 48kb of RAM. Today, the computer has 16GB. So it is in fact a million times.
A floppy disk as I remember had 143kb, and it was already a luxury. Many people who couldn't afford a floppy disk drive had to use a tape recorder and cassette tapes that usually is used for music to record their programs. And then the floppy disk went to 1.4MB... the hard drive went from 20MB in about 1986 to 200MB in 1991, and then 1GB, 2GB, 16GB, 200GB, 500GB, 1TB, 4TB, 18TB.
I do feel it this way: if the hard drive is 2GB max, you can wait a couple of months or even half a year and nothing changes. The price stays the same and the capacity do not change at all. But if you look at 143kb vs 18TB, that's mind blowing.
Processors went from 1MHz (of Apple]['s 6502) to today's 5GHz, so it is 5000 times. If we consider it 9 cores and hyperthreading, then it is 90,000 times.
If we compare 20MB to 18TB, it is 900,000 times, so it looks like RAM and hard drive went up about one million times but a processor went up less.
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