Monster IDE Drives

[David A. Bandel]

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On Thu, 12 Feb 2004 14:27:36 -0500
Joel Hammer <joel at hammershome.com> wrote:

> My first hard drive was attached to my TRS-80, an external
> drive the size of the Manhatten phone book. It held FIVE
> MILLION bytes. I thought I was fixed for life.

Ah the venerable Trash-80.  And the Sinclair (eyes glaze over)?

My first hard drive was in another state, but I understand it was the
size of a stack of phone books (drum memory anyone?).  What I used for
local storage was punched paper tape (wound in a figure 8 and hung on
the wall).  I had a six foot wide wall for hanging tapes on and thought
I had enough storage capacity for all eternity.  The computer terminal
had a roll of paper on it (the CRT was just a Television mounted above
the terminal that had nothing to do with the operation of the system, it
was so we could watch TV while the paper tapes passed data over our 75
baud acoustically coupled modems to the mainframe).

The first hard drive I personally owned (hard drive, not storage device
- -- that was a tape drive that used audio tapes IIRC) was all of 10Mb. 
MFM if I remember correctly, connected to a 286 computer.  It cost me a
fortune, but I also had a 287 math coprocessor installed to speed up
math calculations (even though turbo mode was a blinding 12MHz of
processing speed ramming 16 bits in parallel through the pipes). 
Thought I was in computing heaven and the 10Mb would last a lifetime. 
What's the Linux kernel now?  The 2.6.2 source (compiled) takes up
approx 293Mb of space on my drive.

I imagine in another 5 years we'll all be talking in terabytes (and the
youngsters will be reminiscing about their first tiny 120Gb hard
drives).

Ciao,

David A. Bandel
- -- 
Focus on the dream, not the competition.
		Nemesis Racing Team motto
GPG key autoresponder:  mailto:david_key at pananix.com
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