Weekend Edition: When I Was A Kid, We Had To Listen To Music On Flat Petrochemical Disks …
Blog The Primary Main Objective” does some geeky calculations to find that if you wanted to encode a mp3 on punch cards, one three minute song at 128 kbps would take a stack 5′9″ tall.
A normal capacity iPod would require a stack 16 miles high.
As they note. “That such a huge leap in technology is well within living memory is astonishing.”
For you kids out there wondering what a punch card is (was?), Boing Boing linked to this collection of images from “How It Works: The Computer,” published in 1971, reprinted 1979. It’s another reminder of how far we’ve come.
(and for a glimpse of what life was like before the word “ergonomics” was invented, see this page from the book)
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May 17th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
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