A Million files
Back when I started my first permanent job and was issued with the first computer assigned to me by BT - I've forgotten the model but it would be what is now called a 286 and was then referred to as an XT - a million bytes of Ready memory was considered a lot and a forty megabyte hard disc was so large that it had to be partitioned into two separate virtual drives.
It was possible back then for a hobbyist or expert to know every file on a PC and what it did, and even non experts were used to adjusting some of them, particularly the "autoexec.bat" and "config.sys" files to meet the requirements of special jobs.
I can recall that a couple of years later on one of the first few computers I owned myself I wrote a few batch files which I could use to swap around my "autoexec.bat" and "config.sys" files to use particular applications which had different memory and space requirements.
When my early PCs were new they probably came with a few thousand files including the operating system and a few free programmes.
Sounds like the stone age now but it is less than thirty years ago.
Just had an indication of how much things have changed when I did a security scan today on the PC which I usually use to write this blog.
A full scan involved checking 1,114,461 files. These files use up about 173 Gigabytes on my PC's hard drive, which has a capacity described as 445 Gigabytes on the main partion (not counting the recovery drive).
Slightly confusingly to the mathematician or statistician (like myself) who is not a computer expert, this does not mean 445,000,000,000 bytes but 478,629,007,360 bytes.)
Of the files on the computer, just 9,827 sit in the document folders and similar places where I have stored the files which I manually put onto this computer - a little less than 1% of the files on the PC.
Of the other 1,104,634 files - in text form, that's one million, one hundred and four thousand, six hundred and thirty four files - on the computer, many are parts of the operating system and the basic supporting software - Windows, Microsoft office, my security packages, etc.
More than 43,919 of these are programme files, including 2,607 "common files" shared between programmes. Some will be data files or recovery backups - for example, there are 1,662 backup driver files. There will also be several thousand "cookies," a few tens of thousands of files representing incoming emails, etc.
An amazing 787,869 files are what Microsoft Windows calls "user files" but which were generated by programmes or the operating system, not by users. These represent a little over 70% of the files on the computer and just over a third of the memory space used. For every file which was actually created or put onto the system by a user, there are nearly a hundred "user files" on the hard disc.
No one human could possibly be familiar with all those files and what they do. I take a certain pride in that I used my own brain to work out the ratios between the number of files I myself put onto the computer and other types of file on it, but I wonder how long it will be before most humans would need to use the computer to do the calculation.
The rate of growth of the complexity of the computers we use is quite staggering and although we are not remotely near to building anything like HAL in the next decade or so, I wonder how soon it will be before the computers we use in everyday life are so much more complicated than we understand that an old saying usually attributed to Lyall Watson about the human brain becomes relevant, if not exactly applicable, the the computers we use:
"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
It was possible back then for a hobbyist or expert to know every file on a PC and what it did, and even non experts were used to adjusting some of them, particularly the "autoexec.bat" and "config.sys" files to meet the requirements of special jobs.
I can recall that a couple of years later on one of the first few computers I owned myself I wrote a few batch files which I could use to swap around my "autoexec.bat" and "config.sys" files to use particular applications which had different memory and space requirements.
When my early PCs were new they probably came with a few thousand files including the operating system and a few free programmes.
Sounds like the stone age now but it is less than thirty years ago.
Just had an indication of how much things have changed when I did a security scan today on the PC which I usually use to write this blog.
A full scan involved checking 1,114,461 files. These files use up about 173 Gigabytes on my PC's hard drive, which has a capacity described as 445 Gigabytes on the main partion (not counting the recovery drive).
Slightly confusingly to the mathematician or statistician (like myself) who is not a computer expert, this does not mean 445,000,000,000 bytes but 478,629,007,360 bytes.)
Of the files on the computer, just 9,827 sit in the document folders and similar places where I have stored the files which I manually put onto this computer - a little less than 1% of the files on the PC.
Of the other 1,104,634 files - in text form, that's one million, one hundred and four thousand, six hundred and thirty four files - on the computer, many are parts of the operating system and the basic supporting software - Windows, Microsoft office, my security packages, etc.
More than 43,919 of these are programme files, including 2,607 "common files" shared between programmes. Some will be data files or recovery backups - for example, there are 1,662 backup driver files. There will also be several thousand "cookies," a few tens of thousands of files representing incoming emails, etc.
An amazing 787,869 files are what Microsoft Windows calls "user files" but which were generated by programmes or the operating system, not by users. These represent a little over 70% of the files on the computer and just over a third of the memory space used. For every file which was actually created or put onto the system by a user, there are nearly a hundred "user files" on the hard disc.
No one human could possibly be familiar with all those files and what they do. I take a certain pride in that I used my own brain to work out the ratios between the number of files I myself put onto the computer and other types of file on it, but I wonder how long it will be before most humans would need to use the computer to do the calculation.
The rate of growth of the complexity of the computers we use is quite staggering and although we are not remotely near to building anything like HAL in the next decade or so, I wonder how soon it will be before the computers we use in everyday life are so much more complicated than we understand that an old saying usually attributed to Lyall Watson about the human brain becomes relevant, if not exactly applicable, the the computers we use:
"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
Comments
its just the newer computers are faster at undersatanding and the programming allows for "ifs" and "thens"
sure a logical brain like the pc can calculate pi to the zillions decimal place, something a human brain is not so good at.
show a computer 10 photographs and ask it which one is the car? and it has no chance. But the 2 year old child can do it with ease, so can a parrot.
I remember the first time i was in the USA in 1980, this is the first time i saw the video game PacMan, i was amazed at the sounds it made and the animation, and the colours and things.
A guy who remembers something so old as pacman and the other game PONG, wow i am old right? well im 38 if that is classed as ancient.
And yet the advance in how well computers can do what they do have the ability to do is nothing short of incredible. Your final paragraph proves the point.
People, now they are stupid.
There is a saying, "To err is human but to really foul things up requires a computer."
That's because the combination of a stupid instruction by a human and a computer carrying it out precisely at superhuman speed can make human stupidity into an ever more powerful force, because it will continue long past the point where the human on his or her own would have realised they'd fouled up and stopped.