483
A 1977 Time Capsule, Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder
(techfixated.com)
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2026
483 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
83251 readers
3310 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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!
EDIT: Math fail. Let's say TWO bits are a quarter...lmao
😭
Well...up until recently
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...
I remember my first 2GB flash drive. I thought I had sooo much storage...
Years later when I learned I could get an SD card with 32GB, I was like "It comes in 32GB? 🤯"
And don't even get me started on my first 1TB hard drive!
I was alive when computer RAM was measured in MB, not GB. Yes, I am an old codger
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.
I remember having to fuck around with master/slave configurations with drives. So many headaches were had trying to get them in the right order. Those were the days heh.