shamcy wrote:My first was an Apple IIc and here are the specs:


CPU : MOS 65C02, 1 Mhz
RAM : 128K
Display: 80X24 text mode 560X192 maximum
Storage: Internal 143k
Drive : 5.25-inch disk drive
OS : Apple DOS
Ports : Two serial ports , RGB monitor port, Composite video output, External floppy port

Got that beat.


Stats:
Price : US $999.95
CPU: MOS 6502,1.8MHz
RAM: 8K base, 48K max
Display:24 X 40 text
320 x 192 monochrome
160 x 96 with 128 colors
Expansion:4 internal expansion slots
2 cartridge slots
Ports: 4 controller ports
RGB video output
TV video output
Storage:external 90K floppy drive
cassette recorder

I had the cassette.

timali wrote:3 MB/Sec isn't slow. MB and Mb are megabytes and megabits. Multiply MB by 8 to get megabits. 3 MB/Sec is 24 Mb per second which puts the transfer speed in the same class as a class 4 SDHC card. That's what I use for AVCHD video recording. It's amply fast.

Are you high? At 3MB/s it would take 6 hours to back this thing up!
I'll take a 750GB 7200RPM laptop drive in an external enclosure instead h-e-h. It has more like a 100MB/s transfer speed, well 130MB/s on the outer edge of the platters anyway

mdnorman wrote:Seriously people -- Will someone please tell me why I need a 64 GB USB drive so I can go ahead and buy one.

What the heck do you do with this thing?

backup - small, cheap, huge

sdc100 wrote:Readyboost memory shouldn't be more than the amount of RAM you have. I don't think any home computer has 64gb of RAM. You'd do better getting a cheap 2gb or 4gb SD card.

You can allocate however much of the drive you want to readyboost, for instance 4GB of this 64GB USB stick. The rest will still be available for you to use. I doubt this stick has fast enough random I/O to be readyboost ready.

woolygums wrote:Yo, whippersnapper, MY first computer had 92kb 5 1/4" Floppy drives. 1981.

Were you born yet?

My first encounter with computer addiction. Brought it home Saturday morning and played with it straight thru the night until Sunday evening!

http://oldcomputers.net/osborne.html

Newbie! My first computer had 64K of core memory, a 1MB hard drive the size of a pizza box that stored the o/s, object code and data. Source code was kept on punch cards! (IBM 1130)

I loved my Ozzy 1, btw. I still have one, though people think it's a portable sewing machine until I open it up. Quite the conversation piece at my office.

(Ahhh... Nothing like a stroll down memory lane at 5:30 in the morning!)

sdc100 wrote:I ran the alt.bin.pictures.erotica.hot.rotund.nerds USENET group... Don't tell me that you didn't submit the photo!

Dude, I probably know you. I was on USENET for years....

danwat1234 wrote:Are you high? At 3MB/s it would take 6 hours to back this thing up!
I'll take a 750GB 7200RPM laptop drive in an external enclosure instead h-e-h. It has more like a 100MB/s transfer speed, well 130MB/s on the outer edge of the platters anyway

Don't you mean inner platters?

It's stunning how memory prices have dropped. It wasn't so long ago that I spent about $100 on a 320mb (that's Mega- not Giga-) Microdrive to put into my PDA to record class lectures. For those who don't remember, these were 1" hard drives that fit into a CompactFlash II slot. Being mechanical (the motor was amazing), it drew quite a bit of power, draining my Sony Clie NX80 PDA in about 20 mins.

This offers 20x the memory at half the price, at much lower power consumption and higher reliability.

Even the concept of non-volatile Flash memory boggles my mind. In my days, the only thing that came close was very cumbersome and slow EPROM, which used UV light to erase the contents. And home users can't select what to erase; you have to re-format the entire thing. You can't dynamically use it like RAM.

One of my favorite Seinfeld episodes dealt with George desperately trying to keep his Frogger high score while moving the game console. Once unplugged, everything gets erased. Flash memory, which needs no electricity to maintain contents, was just a few years away.

sdcaclint wrote:my first computer had a 120 MB hdd. I'm feeling really old now.

When I saw the first comment and remembered my first computer with its 250 Mb hard drive, I felt old, not so bad now after seeing yours though, thankyou!

danwat1234 wrote:You can allocate however much of the drive you want to readyboost, for instance 4GB of this 64GB USB stick. The rest will still be available for you to use. I doubt this stick has fast enough random I/O to be readyboost ready.

I've done that but you really shouldn't remove your ReadyBoost drive without powering down first. I suppose you simply eject the drive, but our tech guy said that it's not reliable. That means that the USB drive becomes a semi-permanent fixture, which is a waste. The whole point of memory cards and USB memory is that they're removable at will.

JDAWGRULZ wrote:I got you beat... 2x... Timex Sinclair with 4K of memory & a TI 99-4A with 16K (32K with Peripheral expansion unit).... Both used magnetic tape for external storage. Now I'm the one feeling old.

The TI 99-4A was my first, although I was just a tyke of 7 or 8 at the time. It was of the keyboard-and-cartridges era. We had "magnetic tape" storage for it as well, but for those of you picturing those big reel-to-reel setups, it used regular audio cassettes. Except we could never get ours to work, so when I was done making a program in TI-Basic, I would secretly keep the computer on and the TV (yes, it hooked up to a TV) off for as long as I could, because once I turned the unit off, the program was gone forever. It was like an involuntary form of those zen sand mandalas.

elliottm wrote:you whippersnappers. my first computer had 1KB of memory but was upgraded to 16KB - so much memory! look it up - the sinclair zx-81.

i am suddenly feeling very old.

Old you say?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX80

After I helped a friend build one of these, I lost interest. Could not see that it had any practical use.

My first laptop a Compaq, baught 1999 or 2000 had a 10 g hard drive 5 g useable. I'm not buying one these because I have several 32 g SD cards and a 32 g stick all baught from Woot and under used.

jgary wrote:You kids today. My TRS-80 Model I was decked out with 48K of RAM. IIRC a floppy held 86K of data. I thought I'd never fill one up.

Ahh yes, the TRASH-80, My first hard drive was a Winchester Hard Drive at FIVE MB! Operating system? - Concurrent CPM using S-100 bus. Also 48K. Whoever thought in terms of Gigabytes or Terabytes, NASA???

That was the world first parallel processing computer my friend.

dkeigley wrote:Isn't that one of the extra servers that they fire up during the Bundle of Crops#39;s ?

I kid, I kid

SevenStarSonata wrote:My first laptop, back in 2005, had a 60 GB hard drive. I'm not sure whether to marvel at technology or feel very, very old.

Either way, this is a kickass deal.

That's nothing. My first lap top a 20mb hard drive and cost a little over 5 grand.... Should I feel old or ripped off?

Charlietrent wrote:Does anyone know if this supports Readyboost?

Haaaa!!!!! Why? Seriously....why would you waste a 64GB USB stick on Readyboost?

sdc100 wrote:

I have one of those, in my basement. Still worked, last time I tested!

The Timex 1000/ZX81 was interesting; the SAVE command would save _all_ RAM, including variable allocation etc. So, since you only had 1K to play with, you could type in your BASIC program, then on the command line set your initial variables, then SAVE. To run the program GOTO 10. That saved needing to set initial variables in the program and thus made the program smaller.

I got a Centon 32 gb off deals woot a month ago. It would not format and was corrupted, paid to ship it back to centon, and same problem, Centon has sent me 2 defective products, think I will write off the centon brand if they can't follow through on support.

sdcaclint wrote:my first computer had a 120 MB hdd. I'm feeling really old now.

My first computer didn't have a hard drive. It was an Apple IIc and cost over $2400 at the time.

I think I'm too old to still be alive.

jaburg wrote:Hard drives? Dude, we used magnetic audio cassettes to store data. And that was brand new at the time!

Pass: We used punch cards on our "computer". Now that should tell you i'm old.

does it float?

znutar wrote:floppy drive! You were livin large buddy...we had to wait 45 minutes to load Asteroids via cassette tape!

That's not old! Old is an IBM 519 Reproducer,088 Collator,407 Accounting Machine, 557 Interpreter etc....punch cards boys and girls,punch cards. Now I'm the one with a floppy disk.

sweh wrote:I have one of those, in my basement. Still worked, last time I tested!

The Timex 1000/ZX81 was interesting; the SAVE command would save _all_ RAM, including variable allocation etc. So, since you only had 1K to play with, you could type in your BASIC program, then on the command line set your initial variables, then SAVE. To run the program GOTO 10. That saved needing to set initial variables in the program and thus made the program smaller.

Dude, I bought, the You Assemble It version kit for $99 (to save $100) and the 16KB (yes that's a K) upgrade. It was fun putting it together (some easy soldering) and when it was all done, it booted up! I wrote a quick little Basic program (not much more than a Hello World) and then showed my mom. When I turned towards her, I accidentally knocked it off the table and could not get it working again! Was a fun kit though. Also had a Commodore 64, TI/994A, etc.

I am really cheap (or I wouldn't be here).
I always buy the cheapest thumb drives I can find.
I still have and regularly use the first one I bought (128MB). It and a couple of others have been put through the washing machine and still work well.
Am I looked over by machines of loving grace?
or
Is paying more for a 'rugged' flash drive useless?

yenchen007 wrote:Is 3MB/s READ and WRITE fast or slow?

Took the following from Centon's website.

Amazon and Newegg have it at a higher price and the warranty on the item sold by Amazon and Newegg only carries a 2 YR warrant. This one here at Woot is Lifetime warranty.


Product Specs
Technology: Waterproof USB
Capacity: 64GB
Interface: USB 2.0
Speed: Standard Speed
Write Speed: 3 MB/s
Read Speed: 3 MB/s
RoHS: Yes
Color: Black
Operating Temp: Commercial (0 to 70 C)
Application: Consumer

Part Number : DSW64GB-001
Harmonized Code: 8523.51.0000
UPC: 731969404089
Warranty: Lifetime
Packaged Dimensions: H 6.50 x W 4.38 x D 0.75
Bulk Dimensions: H 2.51 x W 0.88 x D0
Packaged Weight: 0.0800

I have USB drives that run at about 6MB/s, and I could not imagine anything much slower than that. I think 3MB/s would be pretty painful if you are moving anything with any size to it.

For reference, an average sized 75MB mp3 album would take about 25 seconds to copy. A 700MB DVD rip would take almost 4 minutes. a 4GB ISO would take about 20 minutes. If you were to copy 64GB to the drive, it would take about 5.5-6 hours.

Honestly, I would be most concerned about the 3MB/s *read* speeds. Its going to take forever to load any large files off drive, or open large files, for that matter.

abstevens wrote:Here is a link to a youtube review:

I'd call that a sales pitch before I called it a review.

"...from detonating and blowing Kimberly and I to smithereens."

Should be "Kimberly and me". Well, I don't mean it should be me, I'm not that adventurous to need a water-resistant flash drive. I just mean it should be the objective pronoun.

bitman wrote:1.8 million what? I need to know the units, because I too need the the Centox DabaSchmick Blort.

Meters would be my quess...put that in your Blort and smoke it

SevenStarSonata wrote:My first laptop, back in 2005, had a 60 GB hard drive. I'm not sure whether to marvel at technology or feel very, very old.

Either way, this is a kickass deal.

Are you kidding me? I remember being shocked when I found out about the first 40 MB 5 1/4" hard drive for a PC!!! (laptops hadn't been invented yet and yes, I meant MB)

Carp. That was a while ago...

tirk wrote:my first was an ibm clone in 1980 something. I was like 12.

the hard drive was 20 megs.

You had a hard drive???

Well, I'm taking one for the team! Got one for my Prius, so now I can have all of (or most of) my 600 CD's ripped and available for play in my car via the USB port.

Maybe I'll look into SquareTrade since I see a lot of people mentioning how little they trust the brand.

Just keep an eye out for Woot's thumb drives. I purchased a Data Traveler that died about 2 months after purchase. I sent it to DT and they told me it was counterfeit and they wouldn't cover it.

"Waterproof". Wasn't aware the other manufacturers were using water-soluble silicon. Or is it the water-soluble stainless steel connector?

Never trust a company that puts such crap in their marketing claims. And someone else has already noted their history of shoddy products... apparently it's waterproof, but not airproof.

Oh, and the first computer I ever used was the Commodore PET. Tape drives for the win!

I wheedled my parents into getting me the Commodore 64, starting with the tape drive, and eventually got them to go in for a 5.25 floppy as well. That damn thing weighed 10 lbs, I think. Then, to top it all off, I got a dot matrix printer to go with it. I was stylin'!

I actually took the 64 with my for my freshman year of college, wrote papers on it using a word processor program I had put into BASIC from BYTE magazine...or it may have been Commodore's mag.

That stretched it's useful life though, and I ended up selling all of it off at a garage sale after I came back home for the summer

SevenStarSonata wrote:My first laptop, back in 2005, had a 60 GB hard drive. I'm not sure whether to marvel at technology or feel very, very old.

Either way, this is a kickass deal.

My first PC had a 20 MB (that's MEGA-byte) hard drive.

My first job I worked with IBM hard drives. They were 2 foot wide, 10 inch tall cylinders. They weighed about 20 lbs, with 6 or 8 disk platters inside. They were 128MB.

I am old.

Ugh.

tirk wrote:my first was an ibm clone in 1980 something. I was like 12.

the hard drive was 20 megs.

I had an XT also - 512kb RAM (expanded!) and the 20Mb MFM hard disk. Hercules monochrome graphics (green/black). Thought I was going to run out of HDD room when I started on AOL with my 2400 baud dial-up modem and was downloading pictures. There was room in the computer for a second drive, so I got another 20Mb. Those were the days - Windows NEVER crashed on me! Of course, I just used DOS 3.0...

daemonfly wrote:"Smuggling" it.

lol

I bought 2 of the 8gb versions of these a while back. I kept one and gave one to my daughter. Decent read and write speeds. Both worked great for about 2 years, then they both quit working the same week. It was strange, like they had some sort of internal timer. Just Sayin.

livarchuksimon wrote:Sure its big, but what are the transfer speeds?

TWSS