The restoration of 'Flossie'

[Yorkie]

I note the comment that Flossie originally cost £250,000 to build in 1962, the equivalent of £4.2m today.

It has 100,000 punch cards and 27 reels of magnetic tape, both to record data, and its 12 kilobytes of memory alone weigh half a tonne.

Such puny computing power at such a great cost back then is testament to how far computing has progressed in the last half century.

All that engineering, bulk and collosal cost for just a fraction of the computing power of a modern smartphone.

I noted this comment too:

"You have to remember that file reels in those days were multi-reel, so at 10 meg a reel, 27 reels, we're up to a quarter of a megabyte - and 50 years ago that was a lot of data."

Hmm, it may have been a lot back then, but even an obsolete 3.5" floppy disc - which were commonplace only 20 years after Flossie was buit - would store 1.2MB.

A CD will store 700 MB, a DVD 4.7gB and a memory stick in the palm of your hand will store from from 1gB to 64gB and more.

The mind boggles!