I love broadband

There is not a week that goes by where I am not amazed with the rapid advances in technology.  In the past few months, I have downloaded gigabytes of data from various sites, mostly new operating system distribution ISO’s.  This morning, I’m sitting in my den on a laptop with a wireless connection to the Internet.  I am downloading a 339 Meg file in less than ten minutes with an average transfer rage of 1.53 Mb/sec. 

My laptop weighs 6 lbs, has a dual core CPU, 4GB of RAM, and two SATA drives (150 and 500 GB).

In the mid-80’s, I ran a public access UNIX system and several different multiuser BBS’s (Bulletin Board Systems).  At that time, the limitation of file transfers were 2400 bps (bits per second) modems.  The size of the downloads were typically about 20 minutes.  The size of our hard drives were 10 Meg to 40 Meg.  I was running a full UNIX system, with development tools, man pages, application software, and downloads on a system with two 40Mb disks and a ‘high performance’ RLL controller.

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