The Windows 95 box that I still have is a Gateway that arrived in a box that looked like a Holstein hide. It came with Office already installed. It was ready to do everything right after you plugged it in and connected the modem to the phone line. The world was your shellfish as you connected to the Source or Compuserve {heaven forfend that you would use AOL]. It was Sox’s favorite butt warmer.

The $40K wouldn’t cover the cost of all of the electrical clean-up you would need to ensure it didn’t go up in smoke because of a power fluctuation. That’s a good match for an AMD 64-core 4.2GHz Ryzen Threadripper Pro that supports 2TB of RAM and other objects on my wish list.

Yes, the Megaprojects series is much easier to watch than Monoman. The “Buff” [Big Ugly Effing Fellow] or B-52 is like the A-10 a purpose built aircraft that does a job better than anything that has been built since. The B-1 and B-2 are both wastes of money. They should re-engine it to reduce maintenance and increase fuel efficiency but it is a whole lot of bad news if you are on the ground and see it coming over your position. Doing an after-action survey on an area that has been carpet bombed will convince you that seeing them overhead is an indicator that you need to leave immediately. That’s just conventional ordnance. They can carry cruise missiles and all kinds of nastiness.

Yes, US airmen were not popular in Spain after Palomares. The tanker was probably out of Terrejon AB near Madrid, which was a SAC rotational base during the Cold War. I flew out of the Naval Base at Rota, Spain. Rota was also a tourist location and the Barkeepers/publicans were Irish women. Drank too much Sangria [AKA grape Kool-aid]. The Guardia Civil didn’t really appreciate frivolity. It was probably the submachine guns that made them unapproachable.

I got an email a couple days ago from a tech news site I keep an eye on. A company named Nimbus Data just released an 100 TB SSD in a 3.5″ form factor. It’s price is US$40,000… How many do you want? 😉 😆

That last couple videos from Mr. Monotone have been an improvement! He’s trying to add some humor and a bit of a change in tone. He must have read this thread. 😆

I watched a video from my (current) favorite Brit, Megaprojects about the B-52 Stratofortress. I knew several crashed during development & the early days, and that a couple had been carrying nukes. But it seems there were actually 6 carrying nukes, and 4 were within the USA. On Jan 23, 1961, a B52 carrying two MARK 39 4 Megaton nukes started disintegrating above Goldsboro, Nth. Carolina. The two bombs jettisoned and their parachutes deployed. In 2013 when documents were released, stated that on one of the nuke’s, the first three stages of their four stage arming system had activated. Another incident over Palomares, Spain in 1966 when a B52 & an KC-135 tanker were involved in a refueling incident when the KC-135 fuel load ignited. Four nukes jettisoned with one landing in the sea & three on land. On two, they conventional payload detonated. Nether of their plutonium payloads reached critical mass, but one had Plutonium scatted over about a sq Mile. The US spent years in cleanup, but there are still traces of contamination today.

Curiously, the USAF have announced a life extension program to keep the B52’s flying until 2045. Almost 100 years of service. That will be a hard record to beat.

In ancient times when MS-DOS was limited to 640KB RAM some motherboards allowed you to install 1MB RAM and use the extra for a RAM disk, which was an easy way to speed up searches by loading the indexes in RAM. SSDs give you even more space to use for random access searches, but being an “old fart” I prefer to have the basic data base and permanent copies on multiple drives for reasons of secure storage and back-ups.

The hard disk system on a Data General Nova 3 cost $10,000 for 5MB of fixed space and a 5MB removable cartridge [14 inch platter in a housing. That’s why I considered $900 for a hard drive to be cheap.

The dude needs to study some Monty Python videos.

SSD’s are much better than spinning rust for random operations & have higher IOPS performance. Apparently, Seagate are NOT giving up of mag media yet. they are working on a dual actuator per platter/side to have 2 R/W op’s each with a smarter controller so that sequential data can be stored much faster by doing multiple bit writes & reads. Will be interesting to see if any of that happens!🤔😐

HDD’s have come a looong way since IBM introduced the IBM 350 disk storage unit in 1956! Which IBM only rented to customers for US3,000/mth! It had a capacity of 3.75 MB.

I’m getting used to that Coreteks narrator’s monotone! 😳🙄

The Brit, Megaprojects, posted a great vid on the The Nimitz Class: The Nuclear Powered Supercarrier

The difference between the birds was range and radar signature. The Habu carried more fuel for more range, and there were tweaks in in materials and design that reduced the radar signature and heat signature. It wasn’t invisible, but you had to suspect it was there to find it. Long range interceptors were a Soviet weakness.

I did data base stuff and SSDs would speed up some functions, but moderately fast RAID systems were a better bet because they were safer. Loading a subset of the data base and indexes onto an SSD for searches makes sense, but the data needs to be on the spinning rust.

As you point out, you can has multiple copies of mission critical data on separate discs for the price of a SSD.

The A-12 Archangel: Faster, Lighter, Higher than the SR-71

A lot of people really don’t understand most computer technology and especially “permanent storage”. Most write off HDD’s for SSD’s. Which is a huge mistake. I use SSD’s, yes. Where I need the best read/write performance I can get & other reasons. But, there is a high price! The Seagate EXOS Enterprise HDD’s are underrated, except by Corporate users.

Some reasons why I decided on the EXOS X14 12TB:

Primarily the Cost / TB:
Seagate EXOS X14 12TB SATA3 HDD: AU$33.75
Samsung 860 EVO 4TB SATA3 SSD: AU$223.75

Average Sustained Sequential R/W Performance (Measured):
EXOS X14 12TB SATA3 HDD (formatted 4KB/sector): 283 MB/s Read, 251 MB/s Write
860 EVO 4TB SATA3 SSD: 533 MB/s Read, 511 MB/s Write

Average Random R/W 4K Performance (Database, Measured):
EXOS X14 12TB SATA3 HDD: 2.6 MB/s Read, 12.1 MB/s Write
860 EVO 4TB SATA3 SSD: 39 MB/s Read, 89 MB/s Write

Reliability:
EXOS X14 12TB SATA HDD: 550TB/yr R/W, 2.5 Mil. hrs MTBF, 5 Year Warranty
860 EVO 4TB SATA SSD: 2,400 TB Written, 1.5 Mil. hrs MTBF, 5 Year Warranty

Other:
The EXOS X14 HDD is a SED (Self-Encrypting Drive) that has no noticeable performance impact. It also has a very fast H/W secure erase feature & much better power management features than other HDD’s.

The 860 EVO SSD is smaller, lighter & uses significantly less power & generates less heat (though the Helium filled EXOS X14 doesn’t generate much heat either compared to normal HDD’s).

This summary doesn’t really do either justice, but gives an idea. 😉 😀

Wordstar and VisiCalc were the reasons the early systems went out the door.

I actually started a comment regarding the monotone delivery of that YT vid narrator. Then decided to delete it & see how far you’d get! 🤭😏😈

I first thought he was using some kind of vocoder or text-to-speech s/w! But then watched a live stream where he interviewed a VP of a new tech Startup. Same voice.🤷‍♂️😕

Yes. I still remember ~AU$1,600 for my first 40MB HDD! Heck, a basic 8086 (not 8088) PC with 640 KB RAM KB/Mouse, two 5.25″ FDD’s & green CRT display (from ICL) with DOS or CPM, and Wordstar was around AU$3,400! 🤔 We sold them in my PC shop I started with a friend in 1980.🙄

My point is that the genius of Kelly Johnson was not “reinventing the wheel” but re-imagining it and molding it to a new use. That is essentially what was done with the B-57 Canberra in the conversion to the WB-57 which had wings the length of a U-2 and two huge fan jets and two more ramjets. for “upper atmosphere experiments”. The US once created bespoke aircraft from what ever was in the hangar, and now we can’t build aircraft to plan in less than two decades.

Yeah, we are in agreement that cable television is a wasteland of channels that no one wants to watch but you have to pay for them, so a decent Internet connection has more value. (Before COVID, it was kids getting out of school and signing on to play games in the afternoon.)

The video was interesting but the narrator was beyond boring. He needed to change his voice occasionally to keep people awake.

Thank you for “Serverpartdeals”. That will definitely be my source if I build another box. On the nostalgia side I remember paying $900 for my 10, 20, 40 and 80 megabyte hard drives. Just amazing how the cost per megabyte has dropped.

Agree about the spiral death of TV programming! I miss Cosmos & others. 🙁 But, now I have an alternative! And unlimited Internet Monthly bandwidth. Since I switched to a better NBN provider (which cost me an extra AU$12/Mth) the reliability & d/l speed has improved significantly. I figured the previous one was ovrselling connections to sell it cheaper. Everything has a price! Speed has increased from between 4.7 – 5.6 MB/s to 6.5 – 7 MB/s depending on the time of day. Lower speeds were typically late afternoon & evening.

I just picked up an amazing deal on Amazon that really blows me away. And it’s being shipped from FL. 😆 An Amazon seller called “Serverpartdeals”.

I had a notification set to tell me if anyone has an Seagate EXOS X14 12 or 14 TB HDD for sale under AU$500 & shipped to AU. I wasn’t expecting anything. Got an email today… The cheapest price here from all the AU online stores, is AU$635. Serverpartsdeals in FL have them for AU$405!! And that’s with free shipping (because of Amazon Prime). Two other US sellers that ship here, have them for AU$615. I checked that the drives are NEW, and was told they are. So I just ordered one.

I had an EXOS V5 8TB HDD that I got in 2016 (two actually. They were originally mirrored backup drives for my MAS), but it filled up fast. I’ve been ripping my collection of Movie / TV Series DVD / BR discs. Originally, I was ripping them to AVI, but they take up a lot of space. Especially the BR. Between ~6GB (DVD) to ~14 GB (BR). With my new gfx card, I can rip them to compressed 1080p x264 MKV format from about 2GB to 6GB. And the 2nd 8TB EXOS can go back to being my backup mirror. I was concerned with having only a single backup drive. Funny thing… the Enterprise level EXOS drives are a LOT cheaper than their equivalent IronWolf NAS drives, have a longer warranty (5YR vs 3YR), higher performance & a longer estimated lifespan! I’d never buy an IronWolf drive (though, I do have 4x 5TB ones in my NAS 4 PRO. But that was a package deal.)

Here… You might find this YT Tech video interesting. Start’s of with some IT history that should bring back memories. It did for me! Ends with what’s coming next… I’m drooling! 😉 😆

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW-7Y7GbsiY