A question for all the old computer fogies

[jmowreader]

This is for the folks who had computers oh...maybe ten to fifteen years ago.

Think back to your first hard drive. How big was it?

Now! How many files (not applications, data files) do you have on your current hard drive that wouldn't fit on that first one--by themselves?

My first hard drive was a GCC HyperDrive FX20. Twenty megabytes of vastness...right now, I have a book about colonial potters on my hard drive that's got 30MB and 40MB photos in it, and lots of them. The QuarkXPress file itself is 27MB. (Total Files That Wouldn't Fit on the GCC: probably about 500.)

[BattyDem]

1. Your post reminds of of that famous Bill Gates quote:

"640K ought to be enough for anybody." -- Bill Gates, 1981

:rofl:

[CatholicEdHead]

2. No Hard Drive at all

It was an old Tandy 8086 4Mhz chip with 512K RAM and a 5 1/4" floppy drive.

[politicaholic]

15. That reminds me of my old Texas Instruments computer...

1978...

I saw the same model three years ago when I visited the Smithsonian. I still have short stories stuck on those old friggin' disks that will never get read again.

[Wickerman]

3. dual floppy drives

no hard drive. And the floppies were really floppy (5 and 1/4 inch). Oh, those weren't the days.

[KitchenWitch]

4. Ohio Scientific

No hard drive, all data was stored on a regular cassette tape. 2K of ram.

[rndmprsn]

5. my first PC after my commodore 64 was...

an HP with a pentium I @ 70mhz and a 800MB hard drive....windows 3.1 oh yeah baby...it cost over $2500 too!

now, i have almost 220 gigs of mp3s and divx films alone!

[OldLeftieLawyer]

6. An Apple IIe

Those weird floppies.

I wrote my first book on it, and when the agent read the manuscript, called me to tell me she loved it, she also added, "No more of that dot matrix crap. You've got to get yourself a real computer and printer."

The next day I bought an NEC Versa 6000H laptop (for $3,500!!!), which had a whole megabye of hard drive space. I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen.

[Redstone]

7. Data Frame 20 (MB), plugged into a Mac Plus (1 MB RAM).

Can't even guess the answer to the second part of your question.

Redstone

[Historic NY]

8. I had one of them 20 mg Macs, you could put in a back pack....

when I think back of all the crap I did on it while doing my masters I wonder how it even happened. We used to do file conversion from DOS to MAC and everything else. Its a wonder I even got the note to load.You know that damn thing cost me $2000 bucko's it came with a printer too.

[FloridaPat]

9. My first computer had a 10 meg hard drive. It took over a year to

fill it up. My second had 100 - took 6 months. My third had 4 gig. Took 4 months to fill it up. I am now into graphics and need a lot more then the 40 I currently have on my laptop. But I'm still plugging away. I've had to take a lot of graphics off the pc.

Yes, non-Windows programs were great on hardware.

[babylonsister]

10. I'm a fogie but not of the computer variety. I

remember all those songs I downloaded on dial-up before it became illegal, or before I knew I might be breaking the law. But the time it took! :wow:

[Ezlivin]

11. Sinclair 1K

With a whopping 1K of volatile memory, no cassette or hard drive, it was my first computer. The monitor was a 15 inch B/W television.

[LeftyMom]

12. 20 Kb on the C64a

I have 25030 files larger than that and 69311 that size or smaller on my present computer. :)

[qnr]

24. Atari 800 - 88K (and 170K) floppies, then a 3Mb HDD for it

we won't even discuss the cassettes.

[Nite Owl]

13. I don't remember the old

Commadore but I do remember the 'big' purchase of a 1gig hard drive. It was for Christmas for the family kind of present and it was expensive too, something like $4-500. We thought it would last forever!

[Dave Reynolds]

14. My first hard drive,

a Seagate of immense 40 MB size, in a screaming powerhouse 12 Mhz 286 with 1 MB of RAM.

I wuz the cat's ass amongst my nerdy friends.

[amerikat]

16. I saw one of the first hard drives. 3ft diameter aluminum disc

a quarter of a an inch thick. IBM I think it was. A friend had saved it when he worked for IBM. It was just the disc and hub no electronics or housing.

My fist hard drive was a 20 meg Seagate in a 8088 IBM clone.

My first storage was a cassette tape drive on a radio shack color computer. I still have that computer. It came with 4K of ram.

[jmowreader]

17. Okay, folks, we need a little amplification here...

Note I said "first hard drive." NOT "first computer."

My first four preassembled computers--a Commodore VIC-20, a Commodore 64, an Apple IIc and an IBM PC (not a clone or compatible but an actual IBM)--had no hard drives. And my first Mac didn't have one for the first year I had it.

Now! How big was your first hard drive, and how many files do you own right now that wouldn't fit on it?

[AntiCoup2K4]

18. My 286 had a 10MB drive

But before that I had the Commodore 64 and before that (briefly) the Vic-20. Both of those came with a cassette tape drive. Yes, that's right... (for you non-80's geeks who may not know)..the thing loaded software from a fucking tape deck! Of course I eventually bought the 1541 floppy drive as well. Eventually they did come up with an external hard drive system for the C-64, but I never got one.

[MazeRat7]

19. PDP-11/73 w/RL-02 Removable Media Drive

This was my first "home" computer and the drive platter was about 18" across and stored 10Meg of data.

MZr7

[Lerkfish]

20. actually, I'm REALLY old, before hard drives.

I used the first macplus, swapping out 400k floppies, producing newspaper graphics on deadline. system on one floppy, macdraw on the other.

[ovidsen]

21. Memories... or nightmares?

It was 1985. My first PC was a Tandy 1000SX with an Intel 8088 processor running at 11 mhz (I think), two 5 1/4 floppies, a 20 meg hard drive, a 2400 baud modem and a dot matrix printer. It had 384 kb of RAM, which I later expanded to 640 kb (noting as another poster has, that Bill Gates himself had said that any more RAM was a waste). Oh yes, and a black and green monitor.

I had DeskMate and WordPerfect on the hard drive. Also a couple of telecommunications programs that I used to access the mainframe at work. It was so much fun to be able to work at home... in my underwear... watching MTV, eating pizza and drinking beer.

Yes, it was 1985. I thought I was hot shit. And I never filled up that hard drive.

Now I'm 256MB RAM, 80GB hard drive, etc. etc. :eyes:Sheesh!

[Rabrrrrrr]

22. My first hard drive was 100MB

But I used computers without hard drives for ages before buying my first PC in 1993 - a laptop with Win 3.1!

The TRS-80 and Apples had cassettes. THe Apples we had in high school had 5 1/4 inch floppies.

My Atari 800 had a cassette tape, then later I bought a 90K floppy drive for it (for $400!!!, to go with my $350 9-pin dot matrix epson ribbon printer).

Then my Atari ST had no hard drive, but had those awesome 3.5 inch 1.4MB floppies! WOO HOO!! With which I wrote my thesis, and printed out on that aforementioned epson 9-pin dot matrix printer.

In college, when we finally got PCs, they were all, I think, 10MB harddrives. My college roommate had a PC with a 10MB harddrive. That was soooooooooo fucking much storage, it was incredible!!

[lpbk2713]

23. First home PC was a Wang 386 with a 40 Meg HDD

It ran Win 3.1 and Works for Windows. Also ran Crosstalk for dialing into BBS's. Had a few games like Duke Nukem and Commaned Keen. This was in the mid 80's.

[Iterate]

25. I spent dearly for 10 MB

in the early 80's. Just a few years before that, a company I worked for spent $80k for 280MB, similar to this IBM 3340.

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[trotsky]

26. Well, my first computer was a Commodore VIC-20.

TAPE DRIVE, baby!

The first computer with a hard drive *that I owned* was a generic brand 486SX (couldn't afford a working math coprocessor) 33MHz with an 80 MB hard drive. I filled that up pretty fast, and so bought a 120 MB slave drive, I think it was a Maxtor, for something like $200. This would have been in early 1993. Yeah, I've got some files from BitTorrent that would fill that puppy several times over.

[kick-ass-bob]

27. I didn't have a hard drive on my first computer.

I bought one for it a few years later - 40 MB.

[Taxloss]

28. A cartridge loaded ZX81 - no hard drive.

Lovely little machine, though.

I can't remember the capacity of the first PC we had at home, but I remember it ran at a blistering 12.5mhz.