The Hobo Camp Fire Is going well #VII.. Stop In!!!

[ezdays]

Yep, today's electronics are much more efficient than those in the past. A friend of mine (now deceased) had an ancient Honeywell computer in his basement. With all it's component pieces (cpu, tape drive, printer, sorter, etc) it weighed nearly five tons. I had a lot of fun playing with that thing. It loved electricity. The more the better. He had to call the power company and let them know it was going to be operation so they would be expecting the load. His electric bill could be as much as $700 a month and that was in 1984 dollars. By comparison I can have my //e (1980's technology) running all day every day and I see very little difference between my electric bill now and what it was before I started using the //e again. One thing is I'm not using the old power hog green screen monitor but a modern flat screen LCD TV.

I might have mentioned this in the past, but the first computer I worked on was a Univac Solid-State 80/90 computer. The main processor took up about as much space as three or four refrigerators and included a drum memory with a capacity of 5000 10-digit bi-quinary (think abacus) words. It was state-of-the-art back in 1960 and ran at a blazing 2 megs. The display was a series of lights and the input was a small keypad. Weight? Dunno, but how much does four refrigerators weight, then double that...