Right now, more than 15 billion miles from Earth, a 48-year-old spacecraft is hurtling through interstellar space at 38,000 miles per hour.
  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.todayEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    Why 8 tracks? They always sucked, even when they were in their prime. Cassettes were always the far superior format in every way.

    The only advantage an 8 track might have is that it was on a loop, so it would repeat by being on a single hub, and, spooling out from the center, and regathering on the outside. That required a dry lubricant on the back of the tape, that would eventually wear off, and the tape would jam up. It was even more prevalent with longer than average albums, like double albums (White Album, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, etc.).

    I guarantee that that 8-track loop jammed up decades ago.

  • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    0·
    15 days ago

    A kilobyte must have sounded like so much memory back then.

    A byte is 8 bits. Even if we want to call bits quarters ($0.25) and bytes dollars, 69KB would be $69,000! That’s a lot of dollars.

    (And it’s actually 1,024 or something instead of 1,000, which just increases it that much more).

    It’s crazy how KBs used to be incredibly meaningful, and now we’re buying multi-TB drives like they’re nothing!

    EDIT: Math fail. Let’s say TWO bits are a quarter…lmao

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.worldEnglish
        0·
        15 days ago

        Sorry aliens but you’ll need to go back to your science labs because we have since discovered how to compact discs themselves. No more data discs the size of records, we can fit an entire 70 minutes worth of full fidelity (to our ears) digital audio and then surpassed even that and managed to get it up to 74 minutes! 700 times 2 to the power of 23 bits of arbitrary data (or maybe it’s just 700 times 8,000,000, we never did figure out the concept of honestly describing things marketers want to sell), all within our outstretched fingers or around a single extended finger.