Right now, more than 15 billion miles from Earth, a 48-year-old spacecraft is hurtling through interstellar space at 38,000 miles per hour.
  • itisileclerk@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    5 hours ago

    In 1977 69 KB was huge memory. First home PC’s from 1980 and 1981 like ZX81 they have 1 KB of memory. One.

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        Sorry aliens but you’ll need to go back to your science labs because we have since discovered how to compact discs themselves. No more data discs the size of records, we can fit an entire 70 minutes worth of full fidelity (to our ears) digital audio and then surpassed even that and managed to get it up to 74 minutes! 700 times 2 to the power of 23 bits of arbitrary data (or maybe it’s just 700 times 8,000,000, we never did figure out the concept of honestly describing things marketers want to sell), all within our outstretched fingers or around a single extended finger.

  • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    27·
    12 hours ago

    Funny observation on the side:

    This content is geoblocked in Germany.
    And, as far as I can tell, trying a few destinations with my VPN: only in Germany…

    So what the hell is in there, that we Germans must not see??? 😆

      • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        l would say there is more advanced information tech in 70s era Voyager than in a typical current German public administration office. ;-)

      • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        6 hours ago

        Impressum would only be a necessity if they were targeting the German market, which they (as an English language only site) are clearly not.

        • robsteranium@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3·
          5 hours ago

          I meant it as a joke but I could imagine them getting one email from Germany about GDPR and then deciding to geoblock the whole country instead of complying (and ignoring the fact it applies elsewhere in Europe too).

    • MonkderVierte@lemmy.zipEnglish
      4·
      9 hours ago

      So france, austria, works? Else, if europe, it could be not wanting to comply with GDPR. Or germnay has a few extra rules they don’t like.

      Edit: Switzerland works, but maybe because IP ranges aren’t that exact.

      Archive link

      • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        4·
        8 hours ago

        Have been thinking the same at first.
        But France and Austria did work. Only Germany was blocked.
        Only thing that is unique to Germany I can think of is the hate speech laws that are very specific towards Nazi symbolism and Holocaust treatment.
        Maybe they had some article (or comments form users…) once that collided with that and decided to just block Germany to make their life less stressful.

      • Multiplexer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        6·
        12 hours ago

        😆

        It’s blocked on the server side, though… (nginx message).

        Maybe some German “Neuland” shenanigans the page owner doesn’t want to be exposed to …

        • Dr. Unabart@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          8·
          12 hours ago

          It’s a slippery slope. If you let the village know there’s a ship sailing the cosmos then next thing you know they’ll want the rathaus to use email instead of fax. Just best to follow the rules and keep things the way they are.

  • Greyghoster@aussie.zoneEnglish
    24·
    15 hours ago

    It and its sibling are probably the only working examples of flywire memory left in existence. That memory with little ferrite corse threaded with 3 wires was very labour intensive to make but was the backbone of the entire computing industry at the time. Very solid and reliable.

  • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    58·
    19 hours ago

    A kilobyte must have sounded like so much memory back then.

    A byte is 8 bits. Even if we want to call bits quarters ($0.25) and bytes dollars, 69KB would be $69,000! That’s a lot of dollars.

    (And it’s actually 1,024 or something instead of 1,000, which just increases it that much more).

    It’s crazy how KBs used to be incredibly meaningful, and now we’re buying multi-TB drives like they’re nothing!

    • osanna@lemmy.vgEnglish
      7·
      10 hours ago

      I remember a time when RAM was measured in KB, not GB. Yes, I’m an old fart.

      • axh@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        5 hours ago

        I was alive when computer RAM was measured in KB and when you wanted to have more of it, you had to manually solder it to the main board… Youngling.

      • fartographer@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        12 hours ago

        Last year, I bought a 22TB hard drive to recover from a 17TB drive failure. I barely got my wife to agree to the one drive, and simply could not convince her that we should get a backup. Our compromise was that I’d add a category to our budget with a year-long goal for a new hard drive. On Friday, I bought my new hard drive after wiping out the category, cashing some old bonds, and borrowing some money from a friend who also uses my server. I wanna fucking cry…

    • pemptago@lemmy.mlEnglish
      8·
      11 hours ago

      Wouldn’t a byte be $2 if a bit was a quarter, or do you mean 2 bits are a quarter? Also i think you were right to use powers of 10 in your estimate. Article says kilobyte, not kibibyte. I really like what your conversion illustrates, I’m just tripping up on the details. I could be wrong-- commenting so someone can correct me if i am-- if a bit is a quarter, 69 Kilobytes would be $138,000

      • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        LOL…yes. should’ve been an Eighth, but we don’t have a coin for that.

        Your math is right. I was just thinking of a Byte as $1.00 and going from there. Then remembered that bits are smaller, but they shouldn’t be $1 because a single bit is not very powerful. But making it worth $1 or $0.01 would make the math messier.

        But yes. Two bits are a quarter is probably the best compromise! Lol