The history of computer storage

Great find..thanks. Enjoyed it..and the hours of subsequent, related youtube surfing off a linked video there somewhere...

 

I learned on the Apple II series when I was 8-9 years old..that was in 1982. I remember a field trip going to a PC store and seeing the commercial for the Mac before it was released..

 

Think I had a Vic-20 at that point... 5Kb ram... good times

 

I still have a 386 laptop at my parents house in storage. Loaded with Windows 3.1 Takes about 10 minutes to start up... LoL B+W LCD screen.

C:\
C:\Dos
C:\Dos\Run

dir /w /p

anyone remember the nuke command?

 

Haha! nice.. that's a keeper.

I have an Amiga 2000HD complete system in storage in my basement. Still works too. Someday a museum piece perhaps.. haha.

 

del C:\ /s /f /q
? hehe

 

I'm not even sure what was the first, but I've used tape storage for the TRS80 Model-I, the Color Computer, CoCo-II and CoCo-III, a couple of TRS80 laptops, Commodore C-64, buddy had a Vic-20.

Some game machines also had a tape interface.
The Atari 2600 and 5200, and Bally Home Arcade could run game cartridges, or accept a BASIC prom cart that had a cassette interface for program storage.

Ex wife's father ran a print shop in Costa Mesa on his Bally machine with a Viper 16k add-on.
It took him over an hour to load the boot program, then another hour to load the shop program and customer database.

 

Even in the last few years, advances are astounding.
15 years ago, if you had told me that in 2012 I'd be carrying around 32gig on my keyring, I'd have asked you what anyone would need that much storage for, and can I have some of what you've been smoking!

A 2 terabyte hard drive for $110? Insane. My desktop has a pair of Maxtors, 250 and 160. I built the machine in 2001, IIRC, with the 160 and an 80, and in 2006 I reinstalled Windows and upgraded the C drive to the 250.
Always upgraded my drives that way... move the C to the D position and upgrade the C.

And I've always paid around $200 for my drives after the first one... $600 for a Miniscribe 64meg RLL for my Tandy 1000ex. After that I bought Seagate 40meg and 80meg for my first AT clone. Ran those drives until around 1993 when I moved to IDE. My first IDE was a Connor Legend 212. That's 212 meg.
Switched to Maxtor after that and it was just a gradual progression up in size over the years.

 

First home PC I owned was 10 yrs ago when I moved in with my girlfriend and she had one. My parents never got one, never saw the need for it.

 

And what did the nuke command do?

 

It is crazy isn't it... I remember paying over $550 for a 105 meg (yes, MEG) SCSI bare hard disk for my Amiga 500 system.

Those hard drives you mentioned... What I remember most about those is the sounds...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P-pYMsTSKw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fOuhpF_BrQ

 

Ya.

I ran a BBS (Colossus Galactica in Orange County CA 1:103/307 and later 1:103/704) from around 1988 until 2001.
Those old MFM drives sounded like dishes rattling in the sink when a user would log in at 3am.

 

Wow.. are those FidoNet addresses? There's a blast from the past.. I had a FidoNet point address at one time.. oh so long ago.

 

Yup.

From '95 to '01 I even ran a personal FTP server (I have a static IP) and ported the echos to my pointnet that I called "Net 704"
I was the North Orange County hub 1:103/300 for about 3 years.

I got a lot of shit from the REC because of the activity from the points, but I pointed out that the only difference between my "points" and local BBS users was that my points were "calling" in via FTP and using a local mail reader, rather than having to do everything online, and it was no different from some porting software that allowed users to download echos, reply using Word, and upload.

 

format C:\ or rmdir C:\

I remember modeming into a bulletin board. The board manager had a prompt that said, "To proceed, press CTRL-ALT-DEL".

The first troll.

 

I remember looking in our local Computoredge magazine. It was a free magazine that had ads to local vendors. They also had articles and a huge bulletin board list. I used to parse that list regularly looking for cool BBS sites.

 

I used to work on a Xerox Sigma V computer when I was in the Navy. It was the mainframe computer for our F-14 flight simulators. It was loaded with a magnetic tape unit. There were card readers and paper tape readers as well but they weren't used by the time I got there in 1981. It was a 32bit system and came with 16K of core memory with a maximum capacity of 256K.


This was the hard drive in the system. I was a large spinning disk with 512 fixed heads. It stood about 2 feet tall. I think it's capacity was about 3-5 megabytes.

 

The better NUKE command was FDISK

 

Basically you could delete and folder tree without prompts. Nuke C:\ game over.

 

In layman's terms, to quote Antonio from Barter Kings.."Bah-BAM!" Got it