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I started as a consultant to the US Air Force. I recall a classified disk pack (DEC/VAX, I think) being "de-classified". The USAF was diligent about destroying anything that might even remotely contain classified information.
Two airmen carried the pack out onto the tarmac and literally pounded it flat with 12 lb sledgehammers. The remains were thrown in an incinerator.
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This reminds me of something I read on usenet, long ago. The thread was about how to effectively decommision hard drives. One poster related how he had attended some event, and casual conversation of professionals turned to this subject. There were various solutions, including shotguns, large magnets and power saws. One of the participants said something like "I'm with the NSA, and we put our old drives in the N-Test holes, before detonation." They all laughed. Then they realized the NSA guy was serious.
"A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants"
Chuckles the clown
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Worked at a small PC build/sell shop. Around 90/91, we ordered a 1000MB (didn't know it was called Gigabyte) hard drive for a local hospital.
It was the older bigger size took two drive bays (height) in the PC.
It was $1 per / MB so $1000 and that was cheap. 
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I had forgotten all all about AS/400
And then you had to comment.
The last AIX and Pains systems I worked on was an AS/400 with a failing hard drive.
My job was to export the database.
into Access.
I have LASTING EMOTIONAL DAMAGE from that experience.
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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I feel your pain. I was writing SAS code against a data dump from the 400 in an IBM OS2 PC that was freakin awesome. But the Data structure was icky
To err is human to really elephant it up you need a computer
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How many hard drives did you have on that AS/400?
I had 5 drives on the one I used, the disk storage was RAIDed. When we had to replace the supposedly failing drives (IBM sent me a note saying that the drives weren’t up to their standard of 1 million hours MTBF so they were going to replace them), all that the service engineer (SE) did was to shut down one drive at a time, remove that drive, put in the new drive, power it up, and wait 20 minutes for data to be re-created on the new disk from the RAID information from the other disks.
Not knowing how trivial the process was, I had scheduled the SE to come in at 12 midnight on a Sunday which I figured was when the computing load would be the lowest. I could have saved myself the trouble of staying up that night and could have scheduled the maintenance for Monday morning 10 AM!
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I honestly don't remember the hardware specifics at this point. That was over 20 years ago. 
Check out my IoT graphics library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/gfx
And my IoT UI/User Experience library here:
https://honeythecodewitch.com/uix
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And, there was all that emotional trauma! 
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In 79 when I was in college I couldn't afford a computer so I worked in the computer room at the college and we had a IBM System/360 - Wikipedia[^], with 4 tape drives and a disk drive system with drums about 18" around and 10" deep. Don't remember how much they held, but the system was slow and archaic by today's standards.
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
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I'm not sure if prices are really indicative of how computers have changed, but here goes.
I remember paying around $700 for 64 megabytes of RAM some time after I started working fulltime. I recently paid $200 for 64 gigabytes for my NUC.
I remember paying over $900 for an HP scanner (with a SCSI interface). The last scanner I bought was $60. Actually, no, the last scanner I bought was integrated in a $150 scanner/printer combo.
When I started off, spending $2000 for a PC was the norm. Now I have a hard time justifying half of that.
The one consistent thing is video cards however. I've never paid more than a few hundred dollars for them, yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
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dandy72 wrote: yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
Gamers
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
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Well obviously those are the people who buy these cards. But you can still be a gamer with a $400 video card. There is a point of diminishing returns.
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I have a friend that;
- Buys the latest gear; PC and video cards
- Puts nothing but the OS and game on his PC
- Every 3 months he fresh load OS and games
He's retired and that's all he does is game most of the day.
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
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Mike Hankey wrote: Buys the latest gear; PC and video cards
Well, some people change cars every year, and you can hardly make a worst investment. There are worse ways to waste money on than PCs and video cards; they're still cheap, relatively speaking...
Mike Hankey wrote: Puts nothing but the OS and game on his PC
I see nothing wrong with that. I do have a machine I consider to be my dedicated gaming rig - there's literally nothing on it but the OS and games. Heck, I chat with other online players over Discord, and that is running on a separate computer.
Mike Hankey wrote: Every 3 months he fresh load OS and games
Now that, I do question. Since he uses his PC for nothing else, it's gotta be staying in a relatively clean state.
Mike Hankey wrote: He's retired and that's all he does is game most of the day.
Whatever floats his boat. I've always figured, when I retire, I'll probably keep both coding and gaming...but I suspect I'll do more of the former than the latter.
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I thought when I retired I would slow down, but at 75 I'm working as hard as I did when I was working.
If you slow down, you die!
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
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Right now, I code during the day for work, and spend my evenings gaming to wind down.
I don't expect my schedule to change much; it's just that after retirement, my "work hours" will be (ideally) spent on my own little pet projects. Things I've been meaning to work on for years, but would never pay the bills.
At some point in time, I wrote plenty of little side projects in my spare time, and coding for both work and a hobby just lead to a burnout. I often find myself longing to work on my pet projects again...but not if that's what I'm gonna do day in, day out.
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During the hotter months, I live in FL I work outside about 1-2 hours a day.
We've spent 3 years totally remodeling an old house that needed a lot of work.
We have a large wooded lot and right now I have about 3 large trees down and 4 more that need be brought down before next hurricane. They have to be cut, split and hauled to a place where an elderly lady, that heats her house with wood can come and load them in her truck.
When I'm not outside I read, a lot, code and am learning to play piano.
And as the weather here is starting to get cooler, the roles will reverse spending more time outside trying to get everything done.
It never ends!
A home without books is a body without soul. Marcus Tullius Cicero
PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - Release Version 1.4.0 (Many new features) JaxCoder.com
Latest Article: EventAggregator
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dandy72 wrote: Mike Hankey wrote:Every 3 months he fresh load OS and games
Now that, I do question. Since he uses his PC for nothing else, it's gotta be staying in a relatively clean state.
I have a friend doing the same. He is not a gamer, but a heavy user of a program giving you 90 days of free use, before you have to pay. He cannot afford the price(I know that is true!), and he hasn't discovered which registry entries must be deleted, in addition to uninstalling the program after 90 days. He has tried 'everything', and the only way he knows to make the program 'forget' that he has already had his 90 days of free use is to format the disk and reinstall everything.
I know that there are tools for monitoring all file system and registry operations (e.g. in Sysinternals) during an installation, to see which registry entries and files are created. I have used that myself for similar purposes, but it took me quite some effort to analyze the logs. My friend does not have the background to do it. I am not going to do the job for him. He thinks a complete reinstall four times a year is OK. Besides, if his PC has been infected with some malware, the reformatting will clean it up. It will sweep away that software he downloaded just to try it out. It will free up all his temporary files.
He of course keeps all his user files on separate disks. This includes installers for all the programs he wants to reinstall during a cleanup.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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Sounds like he would benefit tremendously from running a VM, even if only for that one application. What I'd do in a situation like that is install the OS, bring it up to date, create a checkpoint, then install the app. Once the app expires, restore from the checkpoint, then optionally bring the system up to date and create a new checkpoint (merging with the previous one), then reinstall the app. Or even if he didn't bring his checkpoint up to date (always restoring back to the original), it would still be a big time saver. It's not really reinstalling the OS and bringing it up to date that takes time, it's the million little tweaks we all make to our systems over time that do. So if he only used the VM for his one app (and otherwise not bother with the tweaks, or at least apply them before doing his original checkpoint) that would be a lot of time saved.
You do make a good point about the opportunity to clean up malware, or even random downloads that just won't uninstall themselves cleanly. Again, a VM would do wonders.
But I'd understand if that was still too much for him to handle. I applaud anyone who doesn't shy away from repaving.
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dandy72 wrote: But I'd understand if that was still too much for him to handle.
I guess it would be. He probably wouldn't think so himself, and the support he would need from me would be too much for me to handle 
Another side: For economic reasons, he has always been running on historic hardware. For many years, his hardware has been lacking the features required for running modern VMs. He recently bought a new 'cigar box' PC which could run a VM, but the regular re-installation of the OS is routine work, and has been for at least 6-8 years. He thinks it is OK.
Religious freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make five.
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trønderen wrote: 'cigar box' PC
I had to look that up, but Google didn't return much with that terminology.
I suspect you mean one of those small PCs, barely 5x5 inches (if that big). I have a few of those, and love them to the point where I loaded two of them with 64GB of RAM - they're both dedicated to running VMs (I use them rather extensively for work).
But even "only" 16GB should be plenty for his one app.
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dandy72 wrote: The one consistent thing is video cards however. I've never paid more than a few hundred dollars for them, yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
About 15 years ago I worked with a young guy who had EVERY electronic toy known to man. He was a rabid gamer, and bought the newest top-of-the-line video card every 6 months. At that time the cards went for $500-$700. Yeah, they run about $2,000 today.
There is value in having a better card. I installed Skyrim about 7 years ago and my video card was insufficient, so I purchased a better one that cost more than double the most expensive GPU I had previous purchased. I was surprised, as the overall speed of my system noticeably improved. I would not buy one of the high-end cards, but buying above average was worth it.
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Right. I tend to buy "second-best" (not what is top of the line at the time of my purchase, but just slightly lower), and very often you'd have a hard time telling the difference unless you went out of your way to compare the specs. And (IMO) if that's what you have to do, you're trying too hard to justify the extra expense.
That being said, the video card in my current gaming rig is about 10 years old. And I feel like I don't have any incentive to replace it until GTA6 comes out...
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I remember when I bought my first 486 back in the day, and specified a Tseng labs ET4000 based video card, because it was then the mutt's nuts for performance.
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dandy72 wrote: The one consistent thing is video cards however. I've never paid more than a few hundred dollars for them, yet somehow there's still a market for $2000 video cards. This is an area where "more money than brains" comes to mind.
I bought an AMD Ryzen 6900xt when I did my pc for 990€ (around 900$), it was the third best casd in that moment. And... it will remain in my pc until it gets broken.
My primary reason to buy it? I could afford it and it was easier to get one from AMD shop than the 6800XT (was my first selection). Extern shops were minimum 175% (up to 350%) of the official price and I didn't want to pay that (although I actually could)
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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