lots of files

Sure there is! The problem is always with the *read* head! :>

--------------------------------------^^^ recent sex change operation??

:>

I recall having a 512KB (RAM) CP/M box and thinking it was greased lightning!

My first computer had 4 k ram and Tiny Basic interpreter that took up 1.3 k of memory. The first ram was very expensive.

or very old, apperently in the 13th century girl just meant young, knave girl for a male, and gay girl for a female

I had a commodore128, it could boot CP/M from a floppy, I think I did it twice

-Lasse

The problem with disk drive space is that no matter how much storage you have, something will come along and try to fill it. I thought I was doing well to limit my media collection to about 1TB. Then, I started saving multiple image backups of my customers machines. These gobble 30-100GB per backup image. I now have about 25TB backed up, and growing rapidly. GINO (Garbage In, Never Out).

For those that don't believe that hard disks fill themselves while you're not looking, just leave an empty waste basket anywhere in the office and watch as it fill up by itself.

I remember when a 15Mb HDD was an expensive (slow, clunky) luxury... the first one I bought (some years later) was something like 30Mb or

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Ah, leave Sylvia alone. ;-) Redux of all the "when I were a lad" tall tales.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Sure, 640k with a 40 Meg HD was more than I would ever need, at least for what that machine could ever do. That was a commodore XT turbo Clone.

Jamie

Oh, you had one of those Timx Sinclair s too ;)_

Jamie

Sure, i had that with a C-128 with 512 memory expander.. Execute a jmp to address $1000 I think it was and that put you in CP/M land..

Jamie

My first hard drive was a whopping 5 MB.

That seems awfully low. I have about 250k files on my newest machine and it has hardly got any big projects on it yet. That is just for the OS, Office, compilers and work in progress (not counting hidden files).

There are tools that allow you to see where the space is all going and also to look for multiple copies of identical files in different locations. It is surprising just how much rubble can build up in hidden 'Doze temporary directories if you don't nuke them from time to time.

When I change machine I archive the old disk contents, keep it online for a good while and only move forwards anything that I actually use. This avoids carrying too much dead wood around.

No point in having the sourcecode for something where the compiler is long gone and would not run on any machine since DOS 6.22 or a debugger that requires a prehistoric printer port at a particular address.

I don't take bets on lifetime supplies of bulk storage. Editing digital video and rendering it into HD streams can burn up disk very quickly.

Nalimov 6 man tablebases are 1.2TB so keen chessplayers already have that much disk committed (or 160GB for the newer compact Syzygy ones). It is only a matter of time before important 7 man ones come out...

Regards, Martin Brown

How old is your camera? 2MB was typical of the first Canonn digital Ixus

- any decent modern camera image will be in the 10-12MB JPEG range.

Most will do HD video clips at a pinch although it hammers the battery.

Typing is never going to fill it up even if you employ a team of keyboard monkeys. Program output can easily fill it up.

Regards, Martin Brown

And most folks serious about their photos will use RAW rather than suffer the quality reduction of JPG, which is several times bigger. Or RAW + JPG, which is obviously bigger again. At 5-10 shots a second for a decent DSLR, you can fill a lot of memory quickly.

Doesn't take many hours of video, even at HD 1080p, let alone what the

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

If you are doing astrophotography by shooting a huge number of raw (say 3x8 bit or 3x10 bit/pixel) raw frames and after atmospheric realignment "stack" these frames together, you will only need these raw uncompressed frames before stacking. After that you can throw away the raw frames.

For real world photography, increasing the camera resolution doesn't increase the storage requirement in the same degree. Any real photograph will contain unicolor areas that after DCT transformation will contain zero high frequency (or at least low amplitude) components, which can be stored with zero (or few) bits. Combining DCT and RLE (Run Length Encoding) you can do quite a lot of lossless compression, without even going to lossy compression.

The camera lens resolution will drop at the edges, thus there will be fewer DCT coefficients at the edges.

JPEG got a bad reputation, when it was applied too aggressively. For final products, such as displaying on a big monitor or printed on a sheet of paper, it is still OK and the space requirement doesn't increase linearity by the number of raw camera pixels.

For moving pictures, increasing the frame rate (say from 24 to 300 fpm), doesn't increase the storage space requirement at the same rate, since in MPEG the number and size of I-pictures will remain constant, while the number of P-pictures will increase, but the size of each P-picture will drop radically (smaller motor vector _change_ between frames.

Increasing the frame rate might even help the MPEG compressor to segment objects into foreground and background and store them as a separate object.

I can top that: 64K 16-bit words, fixed-head swapping disk, cost about as much as a Buick at the time.

Sure, my cameras claim 10 mpix or so, but that's silly, even with a tripod. I set them to 2M or so. And genrally reduce the pix to

Unless you have Parkinsons or are very clumsy you should be able to get detail to at least 6Mpixels with any half decent modern camera. If you have a steady hand and squeeze the shutter release 12Mpixel is usable although you need good lenses and lighting conditions for that.

And if you are intent on downsampling in the camera choose a power of two down from its native resolution so that Bayer works optimally. You can never get back the information that you have thrown away.

No problem for emails or web but a bit small for print manuals.

Regards, Martin Brown

Those were in the scrap yard, when I paid $5 for that used Ampex drive for my first XT computer.