August 4th, 2008
It’s Never Enough…
Storage capacities have increased incredibly over the last 20 years. First, 5.25 floppy drives - which held a whopping 140K. Then came 3.5″ floppies (at 800K, then 1.44MB), followed by hard drives, Syquest drives, Zip drives, JAZ drives, CD-ROM and DVD-R drives etc.
I remember my first computer, an Apple IIGS, didn’t even have a hard drive. It had only 5.25 and 3.5 drives, and I would have to manually eject disks depending upon how big the application was.
My first hard drive was 80MB - and I remember thinking that was a ton of space. Now, with terabyte drive arrays, 80MB seems unfathomable to imagine.
It’s amazing how far we’ve come.
-Krishna
August 4th, 2008 at 1:21 am
My first computer used cassette tapes. (Commodore Vic-20)
Didn’t hold much storage, but when you played it back through the stereo, it drove the dogs wild….
August 4th, 2008 at 7:13 am
SyQuest drives were awesome, i still got some 270mb drives lying around the house
Sniff…
August 4th, 2008 at 8:53 am
uh i’m not calling myself old.. my first computer I used was an ibm system 370 at my highschool, .. we used punchcards.
August 4th, 2008 at 10:54 am
That first 3,5″ was actually only 400K, on the Mac 128 that is….
seeya
dxtr
August 4th, 2008 at 11:09 am
Yep! you’re right, dxtr. And before 5.25 drives there were cassette drives. Remember those?
August 4th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
the 8gb micro sd card that isn’t as big as my pinky nail is the equivalent of over 5500 1.44mb 3 1/2 floppy disks.
it boggles the mind what we’ll have in just 10 more years time.
August 4th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Do I remember those 10″ floppies, or am I hallucinating about my past again.
August 4th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
I seem to recall 8″ floppies - the tech equivalent of a frisbee, if I remember correctly.
August 4th, 2008 at 4:41 pm
My first computer was a Sinclair ZX81, 2Kb of RAM! wee that was a lot back then. I remember the pain loading programs from a cassette while tuning the reader head with a little screwdriver. Ahhh lovely times. Now my phone holds over 2Gb of memory.
I even remember entering machine code by hand… you never knew if there was an error until too late. You had to think about everything, and make it as simple and small as possible.
Best Regards
August 4th, 2008 at 8:15 pm
Hate to date myself, but I remember a friend’s Commodore 64 with a tape drive, and trying to load Castle Wolfenstien on the thing. We’d get it going, grab snacks, play a little D&D, check the computer, play a little more D&D, before finally being able to play the computer game . . . .
August 5th, 2008 at 4:42 pm
C64 with cassette drive,
then Amiga with 3.5 floppies
then Amiga with 5 Meg HD
then Performa 630 with 20 Meg HD
then PowerMac 8500 with 40 Meg HD
then Pismo with 40 Meg HD
then iMac G4 with 80 Meg HD
then Macbook with 80 Meg HD
then iMac Intel with 320 Meg HD
Used a typesetting machine circa 1980 that used 8″ floppies.
A friend once sent me a punch tape with a Unix program on it (but not a punch tape reader!) and I used to have bunches of thrown-out IBM punchcards [ http://tinyurl.com/5flwyg ] from when my dad was in the Navy (I used them as scratch paper and bookmarks mostly).
August 5th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
oops, eventually did get a couple of Commodore 1541 5.25″ floppy drives where you had to crack the case and score a trace on the board to change ID numbers…
August 7th, 2008 at 7:34 am
Regarding panel #2, the machine I used for software development from 1988-93 had a 20MB HD. I remember how happy I was to get a floptical drive (if a storage technology was doomed, I had it) and thinking how cool it was that I could do a full backup to a single disk.