My first one, was a Commodore 20. I couldn’t afford the 64, but I did buy the optional cassette so I could save my basic programs.

The first laptops we got at work, looked like a small suitcase, and they were made by Westinghouse. The front folded down and had the keyboard. Can’t remember how much ram it had, but it ran off of 2 5.25 inch, 360K floppies. Then we stepped up to a Zenith. It looked more like a laptop, and it had 2 1.44 meg 3.5 inch floppies. Life was good.

I remember buying an Apple Macintosh Iici desktop with a 21" CRT monitor. RAM was 16 MB and H.D. was 128 MB, with a built in 1.4 MB floppy drive. I believe we paid approx. two grand for this setup.

quote:

Originally posted by Redleg06:
Or a 64K limit on RAM and running everything off 5.25" floppies. My first PC was a Kapro 64.

I remember that era, too. My first home computer was a TI luggable.
It had a color monitor and 64K RAM (expandable). It's still around somewhere--hasn't been turned on since the Y2K turnover.

flashguy

Around 1970, the Western Union Data Centers used FastRand II drives. Storage capacity was somewhere around 100 Mbytes, the unit weighed around two and a half tons.

Blew my mind last year when i built my last PC.

I grabbed a M.2 SSD that was 1TB and it just clipped right onto the motherboard. Crazy!

Now they make 1TB & 2TB USB Drives.

I once installed Windows 95 from floppies. I’m still recovering.

I remember our first PC with a built in 10mb hard drive and my dad telling me you would never be able to fill that up. I also remember thinking 1-2gb was huge. Data storage technology has moved so far in the last 35 years.

LoL memories!
I recall being a sysop for a local PCUG (PC users group). Our computer ran a pair of 10mb drives which were treated to a software "disk doubler" to give more effective space. Two phone lines connected us to the world.

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I remember when 10 MB hard drives were standard. I remember when PC didn't have hard drives.

This. I had a Tandy 1000 and thought I'd hit the bigtime when I moved up from dual floppies to a 10(?)MB hard drive. I do remember specifically how much it cost: $700! That was in 1987 so adjusted for inflation that would be over $1700 today.

How much storage can you get today for $1700?

quote:

Remember when 1GB hard drives were a huge amount of storage?

I used to sell the SOTA at the time ~ Seagate 20 MB hard drives (plus a controller card) for I think was around $400 as I recall.
It was a MFM natively based but could actually format 30MB with the controller card doing RLL.
Mid/Late 80's.

I used to sell, and occasionally fix, those.

quote:

Originally posted by Redleg06:
Or a 64K limit on RAM and running everything off 5.25" floppies. My first PC was a Kapro 64.

I started with the Atari 8bit computers with 16k and cassette tape storage and eventually moved to the Atari 16bit stuff and was so happy with my 20mb hard drive that cost a lot.

I used to work on these. It was a 24 bit machine, with 256K memory. I don't miss the middle of the night callouts.

(The bicycle is there for scale.)

quote:

Originally posted by Expert308:
I'm guessing it doesn't have to do with removing games or movies from the drive, does it?

LOL pretty much, at least initially anyway


I still have somewhere in my closet/stash of comp stuff, a 4.5" hard drive from one of my old setups. I can't remember the capacity off hand but it isn't more than a couple hundred megs. I took a pic of it one day next to a 32GB sd card

So my plan when I woke up today was initially going to pick up a 6 or 8TB drive and just swap out my current drive.

Then I went and looked at prices and thought about how long it would actually take to transfer that amount of data..... moved to plan B lol. I have a couple spare 2TB drives. I was just going to add one of them in and move all the non game and movie stuff to that. But then I remembered I don't have enough room in my case for another drive because of my water cooling setup.... so plan C lol

I have my nice big NAS sitting here not doing much other than being a place to store backups, which includes my movies, just shy of 900GB worth. Shouldn't take me more than a hour or two to move a few things around and change a couple settings here and there. After which I can remove that folder from my drive and free up that space.

Games I can't do anything about, that's 1.6TB worth by the way After that, I do have a bunch of old stuff that I don't really need to keep anymore so I will probably need to spend another hour or two going through everything else, but I should bee pretty good for a while again after that

My elementary and middle schools hit the big time when I was there. We had one of those Tandy/Radio Shack keyboards you could hook to a TV and copy BASIC programs from the back of the user manual.

The first computer I owned was a Pentium 75 and I spent the big bucks to go from 8 to 16 MB of RAM. Had a monster video card, a 1MB Trident.

I just went back to some of my first invoices when I started out solo in 1998 and I was selling 2GB Hard Drives for $140.
Not sure what I paid for them back then but less obviously.
As compared to the Seagate 20MB units when I worked for a distributor in the mid to late 80's.
Amazing how it has improved and most of the time stuff works really well today.
Back then we had to use jumpers, pins and cards for everything.
And that was before the Internet hit mainstream in the mid/late 90's.
A lot of people take for granted technology today, complain about every little teeny hiccup or complain about an update.
I guess I just have a little different perspective and respect.

The first computer I worked with (1959) was an IBM 650.


It had a drum memory, 40 bands of 50 words around the drum, each word was a coded 10-digit decimal value plus sign. With a total of only 2000 words of storage, which had to be both data and instructions, one had to be pretty good at compact programming. Access to words on the drum was determined by its rotation, and it was desirable to position instructions on the drum such that they would come under the read heads abut the time the prior instruction finished operation. Instructions had 2 addresses in them--one for data and the other for the next instruction. Both locations needed to be optimized. With 40 locations having the same alignment, it was not usually too hard to find suitable spots.

The 650 did its arithmetic in decimal logic, and stored numbers in a bi-quinary code (4 bits, 5-4-2-1). IBM built and sold 2000 of them.

It's not trivial to compare memory sizes with current machines, but since each 10-digit word could specify 5 printable characters, one could say that a word was the equivalent of 5 bytes and thus the memory was the equivalent of 10Kb.

flashguy

quote:

Originally posted by Leemur:


The first computer I owned was a Pentium 75 and I spent the big bucks to go from 8 to 16 MB of RAM. Had a monster video card, a 1MB Trident.

I bought my first PC in 1998 and still remember the brand and specs:

Compaq Presario
233 Pentium II
32MB RAM
4GB hard drive
and one of those screaming fast, newfangled 56.6k modems!

I remember 5 1/2" floppies. At one point, they went on sale so I stocked up.

Then 3 1/4" whatever you call hem came in soon after. But at one point, they went on sale so I stocked up.

Then iomega discs came on the market.

Now I have a 500 GB hard drive but it's not enough for my needs. My next laptop will have a 1 TB SSD at least. Maybe in 2025 when Windows 10 become obsolete.

In the meantime, I do have a 4 TB Cloud Drive and a second Cloud Drive with 5 TB both with lifetime subscription in addition to my 1 TB OneDrive that comes with my 365 subscription.

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
I remember when 10 MB hard drives were standard. I remember when PC didn't have hard drives.

Circa 1991 or 1992, my close friend and I went over to a fellow PC nerd's place to hang out and check out his newest rig that he built. As we gazed upon it, we queried him about a brick-sized metal box next to the PC:

me --- >"Mark, WTF is that thing there...."

Mark-- >"that's my Two Hundred megabyte external hard drive!"

myself and my buddy --- > "Wow....200 megs. You'll never fill that thing!"

EDIT:

I also remember when having an Iomega ZipDrive was considered cool (and necessary) for archiving stuff.