Speed now & then

[Paul Koning]

> On Mar 29, 2018, at 12:20 PM, Murray McCullough via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> I’m not trying to date myself but have things truly sped up? In 1970’s
> Toronto I had a classic computer, sorry can’t recall what it was, connected
> to a 300 baud modem; by early 80’s had ‘zoomed’ to 9600 baud. Oh, my! [ A
> typical file size to download was probably 1 MB. ] Speed indeed! Yet now,
> here in rural Ontario, Canada, I’m at 5MB/s. Yikes! (Friends in Toronto are
> at 50MB/s.) We can do the math but content, particularly multimedia, has
> swollen in size.[ 1 GB is not unheard of. ] Were classic computing days
> that much slower? Happy computing. Murray  -:)

I remember downloading the GCC release kit over a 56k dialup line, in 2000.  Took a while.

The ARPAnet in its early days had "high speed backbone" links which were 56k bps.  Terminal links presumably 110 bps, that being the speed of ASCII teletypes.  And back in the late 1970s you could still find even slower links in some places, such as 6 bit links connecting teletype machines for newspaper "wire service" feeds.

It would be fun to do a "generalized Moore's Law" chart, showing not just transistor count growth (Moore's subject) but also the many other scaling changes of computing: disk capacity, recording density, disk IOPS, disk bandwidth, ditto those for tape, CPU MIPS, memory size, memory bandwidth, network bandwidth...

All these have grown dramatically, but very clearly not in the same proportion, for some of these the changes are smooth while others are jumps, and the rate of change sometimes varies dramatically over the decades.

	paul