Old School Computers - by Moses

 The Commodore 64

      In 1979, the Commodore 64 came out into the consumer market in North America.  With 64 kilobytes it was reasoned a person could document anything and everything in their home to their satisfaction.  The system carried a Hard-drive, Monitor, Floppy Disk Drive, and keyboard for roughly $700/Unit.  An advancement on technology it was reasoned.  You can store 64 kilobytes of information.  The future, it promised.  In 1977 alone the company NORTEL was trading at 150/share.
  Times have definitely changed as NORTEL currently trades at 7 Cents/share, and today, December 11/13  here in Toronto Ontario Canada an 8 gigabyte flashcard sells for under $20/unit.  Therefore it can store 125,000 Commodore 64’s.  At $700/Unit this would mean that in 1979 had you wanted to back everything up from your hard-drive to an 8 gigabyte flashcard instantaneously it would cost you $87,500,000.  Even at that you’d have to download 125,000 units at separate times (meaning that you’d be backing things up for months on end/8-gig flashcard).  Today there is not just one Port (or Protocol).  We now see U.S.B, AES/EBU, SPIDF, even M.I.D.I (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) protocols, otherwise known as Time-codes.

  Here is the dilemma when analyzing these appalling figures;

       In 1979 $87,500,000 consumer dollars were required to do this lump sum work as the mainframe network was purely done through Military Application software.  However, the Military Application software cost about $3,000,000.  Therefore if you were associated with the North American Military in 1979, it only cost you $3,000,000 to gather your intelligence.  Since it’s naive to assume that Governments haven’t somewhat stock piled on updated technological computer issues, this is what I’d like to know;

      Say you have got a card that gives you access to something and everything.  Does this preclude others from necessities in life?  For that to occur within the World would mean this.  Governments Worldwide have been exempt from being tried for not providing the Right to Life to their citizens.  This is the same premise as paying $3,000,000 with a card, and, $87,500,000 without this card.
  Say you had an 8-gigabyte flashcard interfaced to your Protocol Port of every Commodore 64, in 1979.  This would mean that you’d have enough storage space to monitor 125,000 computers all at the same time.  Through this number crunching, an 8-terabyte flashcard could monitor 125,000,000 Commodores – exponential is the relevant analogy in this context.
  Have early Home Computers been made obsolete?  Has the know how of how to program a computer been erased from the equation?  I would still imagine that being able to program or play an actual instrument, super-cedes having $20 to buy the M.I.D.I trigger to do such.