[eye30]

The machine that kick-started a home computing revolution celebrates its 30th birthday.

Read more here:

20 things you didn?t know about the Apple Mac - BT

[Dazzler]

 

[The Gonz]

I must be pretty geeky. Despite not owning an Apple, I knew just about all of those. Typo correction:
'64GB - that’s 536,870,912KB'
should have read
'64GB - that's 67,108,864KB'
but they probably meant to say
'64GB - that's 512 times the original 128KB'

Whichever way, the number given makes sense only as a representation of 512MB*. Journalists trying their hand at engineering.

---------------------------------------
* Binary (power of 2) systems do not hold the same value for K, M, G, T as the metric system. Each metric 1000 is 1024.

512 MegaBytes itself is a product of binary progression. Hence 512MB is 512 x 1024 x 1024 = 536,870,912.

Expressing it entirely as binary multiples you have
(2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2) x ((2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2) x ((2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2x2)
or in true binary where 0 is 0, 1 is 1 and 2 is 10
512MB is 100000000000000000000000000000.

Ah, the beauty of 1 and 0, the language any switch can understand. Build a few trillion into a machine and there's your computer!

[Phil №❶]

Here's an idea for you, Gonz

What if the binary system became capable of more than 2 states. Naturally it wouldn't be binary any more, but imagine memory capable of handling say 10 states, or more. Who will perfect this first, I wonder.

Another of my future predictions.

[The Gonz]

The world is somewhat ahead of you, Phil. Tri-state technology is out there and there's lots of talk in quantum mechanics of using even more states.

I'm sure many people here who haven't succumbed to Altzheimer's will recall primary school maths exploring number systems of different bases, sometimes with the term Modulo. Base 10 or Mod 10 is our decimal system but as you know Octal is base 8 and Hexadecimal is base 16. These last two are just groupings of the binary values but tristate offer base 3 "Ternary" (using high impedance as the third state).

An arbitrary value of, say, 64
= 40 in hexadecimal
= 64 in decimal
= 100 in octal
= 2101 in ternary
= 1000000 in binary

As you state, there's a huge advantage in working with higher bases even with storage of values but until now the economics have made use of the scalability of the humble switch to good effect.

[diablo]

Quantum computers soon.

I knew most of those things somehow. One thing that surprised me was that the Orwell style ad was from 30 years ago - seems much more recent to me. 

[Phil №❶]

The world is somewhat ahead of you, Phil.

If that's the case, "Stop the world, I wanna get off." 

[FatBoy]

There are only 10 types of people in the world.

Those that understand binary, and those that don't.

[The Gonz]

That was in my DSN email siggie for a decade or so.

[Aussie Keith]

Thanks for sharing the article. 

I purchased some many long years ago a Macintosh secondhand for the princely sum of $150 complete with the actual apple carry bag and 20M external hard drive. It had more RAM than standard which used to cause the poor thing to overheat and the picture to pincushion owing to the extra power consumption.  It was an awesome thing in its day in any case.

As my son's first computer the monochromatic educational games were unsurpassed owing to the integration of what the PC world would describe as "multimedia", images, sound and and voice. The Mac already had it since day 1. For those who recall PC's of the same era, you had a choice of CGA, EGA and a tinny speaker. VGA didn't happen til 87 and polyphonic sound cards later still. And even then as now, these PC innovations were driven by gaming.

These days I have a "hackintosh", a Dell with a Mac OS. Yes, I know, I'll be going to hell for that sort of atrocity - but works like a bought one for the odd occasion I need one.

Gonz,

Do I remember those MAB blocks in different bases? Sure do.  They came into vogue when I first began teaching (1970).  I loved using them with kids.  Most teachers who see them in Maths storerooms don't get it these days.

I use base 2 blocks with kids these days to explain binary number in IT lessons.  I've extended the basic set past 1, 2, 4, 8 by gluing existing blocks from other bases and making new ones.  I now have 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024.

[The Gonz]

@ouri30, wow, I must have gone to a poor school. My teachers didn't have those cool things. That's some great teaching, mate.
Should be a lot more of it today instead of reaching for the calculator

@ouri30, wow, I must have gone to a poor school. My teachers didn't have those cool things. That's some great teaching, mate.
Should be a lot more of it today instead of reaching for the calculator

Thanks Gonz,

I'm a bit of an oddity with teaching these days.  I like to challenge kids thinking.  There are some of us around these days, but political pressure on schools to get kids to perform in standardised testing means teachers teach to tests and challenge kids less to think and problem solve.

I'll be retiring at the end of this year, but deep down I'll always want to challenge young people to think outside the square.