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."
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