Hey, remember the good old days, when technology's refusal to advance at a rapid enough pace effectively handcuffed all the fun you could have had as a child to a radiator and forced you to play outdoors instead like some kind of freak show? If not, this will help ...
With a download size of 19.4 MB and 345 levels, a single level of Angry Birds averages out to roughly 440 Kb. There is likely to be some variance, of course. The levels that make you want to hurl your iPhone through a bus window are probably a bit bigger. At any rate, not even half of one those levels could fit on the paltry 192 Kb that held the entirety of the Duck Hunt universe.
The IBM 3380, one of the first commercially available hard-drive-based digital storage systems, featured 2.5 GB of storage space, was the size of a refrigerator and would set you back at least $200,000. For that kind of cash, you could buy approximately 300 iPods and have enough loot left over to cover the budget of Nirvana's landmark Nevermind album.
If the DynaTAC ran apps, you'd probably have to hook it up to a generator to launch them. With 30 minutes of talk time on a whopping 10-hour charge, it was the kind of phone that you only used to call for help once you'd made absolutely sure you couldn't just fight the bear off yourself.
This one takes some math, so stay with us here. According to this article, the processor on the iPhone 4S was clocked at an impressive 800 MHz. Meanwhile, the computer that controlled the flight of a NASA space lab sported five processors cranking at 0.4 MHz each. That means it takes way more power for you to lose at Words With Friends than it took to successfully navigate around space. How does the iPhone not a have a jet pack app yet?
With 256 bytes of storage, it's a pretty safe bet that there were never enough Altair 8800s in existence to handle the job. At the very least, there isn't nearly enough room in your mom's basement for all those computers.
The first PC modem, the Hayes 80-103A, when hooked up to an Altair (as seen in the picture on the left), could download information at a cold-grease-moving-uphill rate of 300 bits per second. Skyrim's 6 GB of data means that, with that setup, if you started the download right now, you could vote in two presidential elections before it was finished. That said, it's a pretty good game, so it might be worth the wait.
And that's only if you download this version. If you tried to use a Commodore 64 to download the version above with all the Photoshop bells and whistles, the machine would probably explode.
Ajay would love for you to check out his website and follow him on Twitter. He is quite available for writing gigs.
Ajay Kumar
716 Comments