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Be Amazed

Past And Present Technology Then And Now

Be Amazed

Be Amazed

Science, Society & Culture, History, Leisure, Documentary

5710 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2023

⏱️ 18 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Technology is advancing so fast nowadays that it’s important to look back and remember how far we’ve come. From your smartphone to the TV in your living room, let’s take a look at some past and present technology then and now.




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Transcript

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0:00.0

Technology is advancing so fast nowadays that it's important to look back and remember how far we've come.

0:06.8

From your smartphone to the TV in your living room, let's take a look at some past and present technology, then and now.

0:16.0

You're listening. You're listening. You're listening to your listening to be amazed.

0:29.6

We couldn't always rely on the digital realm to store everything from photos to messages. Data storage originated in the textile industry during the 18th century when punch cards were used to record a series of instructions for mechanical equipment like Jacquard Looms.

0:42.0

These paper cards were later used to input data by hand-punching holes and feeding them into a card reader,

0:48.8

which converted specific sequences into digital information.

0:54.0

Holes punched on each column would represent numbered characters in a standard binary code.

1:00.0

And entire programs could be represented as long as the stack of punch cards remained in order.

1:06.0

By the 1960s punch card methods were far less common, and in 1956 IBM also debuted the world's first hard disk drive.

1:15.6

The IBM Model 350, which weighed over a ton, contained 50-24-inch storage disks worth the total of 3.75 megabytes,

1:24.6

and was leased to companies for $3,200 per month, or $30,260 post-inflation.

1:33.3

A decade later, this hulking machine was superseded by a new age of data storage, the floppy disk.

1:41.0

These then flexible disks arrived in 1971 in 8-inch form and later 5.5 and 1⁄2 and 3.5 inches

1:48.6

and were written in red using a floppy disk drive. The original 8-inch floppy disk had a storage

1:54.8

capacity of about 80 kilobytes, meaning you'd now need about 50 discs to store one four-minute song.

2:02.5

1999 saw the arrival of the impressive and super compact SD memory card from Sandisk,

2:09.1

Matsushita, and Toshiba. And in 2000, people were first introduced to the familiar USB thumb

2:15.4

drive, initially capable of 8 megabytes of storage.

2:19.1

Nowadays, USBs can support hundreds of gigabytes of data, and there's even a micro-usb smaller

2:25.2

than your finger, and the thickness of a needle that can hold a whole terabyte. That's 40 hours

2:31.3

of 40K video. For comparison, you need 266,66, 666 IBM 350s to hold that.

2:41.1

Most people now rely on the digital capacities of the cloud, first introduced in 2007,

...

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