Hard Drives: What a difference 20 years makes.

[Daniel_Bingamon]

I still have my KSR-33 (the KSR Model is like the ASR-33 only without the paper punch unit), I used to connect it to my Commodore 64 through a 2N2222 Transistor to do printouts back in 1984.

No mass storage as I recall, only paper punch tape on a Teletype ASR-33 terminal:

Wrote a BBS program once for the Commodore in basic with an online adventure game.

I worked at a company that had a PDP-11/45 running RSTS/E operating system. They had the big removable multi-platter 33 MB Drive units. About the size of a kitchen oven floor unit, one day I was pushing one of those spare units down the hallway to the storage room and a forklift come crashing through the door way and hit the drive unit and it hit me - it sounds funny today saying that I got struck by a disk drive on wheels - but it hurt!

I also have one of those tube powered Western Union Fax Machines - prints on 4" wide special conductive paper.

[djm]

It makes me laugh to be reminded of punch cards. A woman I knew found herself swept up in the terror of Y2K in the late 90s as there was suddenly this great need for keypunch operators. It was the only legitimate job she'd ever had in her life, and she was quite good at it, apparently. It was quite an adjustment for her to go back to work among the straights for a while. Good money for her while it lasted, though.

djm

[fyffer]

Speaking of punch card computing ...

I work for a software company founded in 1978*. Their original (and still flagship) product is an FEA simulation software package called Abaqus. Back in the day, the model and simulation information was entered (as was everything) on punch cards. One card for node information, another for Element definitions, another for Materials, etc. A deck of these cards defined your complete model.

Of course, that method of input has long since been replaced with a standard text file, but we still call them "input decks", and the associated data pieces "cards".

Oh, the anachronism of it all ...


*Couldn't resist the opportunity for a 'plug': The company is D'Assault Systemes Simulia Corp., formerly Abaqus, Inc., formerly Hibbitt, Karlsson and Sorensen, Inc. www.simulia.com

[dwest]

My first computer was a woman mathmatican my mother knew who had worked for NACA, loads of memory but difficulty with function applications such as anything to do with everyday life. Apparently she was scrapped at the end of the war, a shame really as she had no business being subjected to the real world.

[djm]

Oh, the anachronism of it all ...

My first attempt at teaching scripting was to tell a group of women they'd have to remember to conf their titties. It took another hour to explain my way out of hot water.

djm

[pipersgrip]

This is almost 20 years.

[emmline]

Mac SE. Circa 1988. Hubby went to one of those "invest in real estate and get super rich" seminars that he used to so love, and
called me up all enthusiastic about some investment analysis software + hardware bundle they were pushing. I said "cool, do it."
Not because I wanted the software. Because I wanted a computer. The software was crap, just like most of those seminars, but
that got us started on the neverending road of Mac ownership.
We added an external hard drive to our SE a few months in, and a modem. I insisted on the LQ or "letter quality" printer because I
wanted to be able to submit material that looked typewritten.

[hans]

Okay, in honour of Big Blue:
The first hard disk drive was the IBM Model 350 Disk File that came with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer in 1956. It had 50 24-inch discs with a total storage capacity of 5 million characters (just under 5 MB).


and: the first plug-compatible disk drive (the two washing machine sized units on the right)
The IBM 2311 disk storage drive was introduced in April 1964 with IBM's System/360 computers

The 2311 stored 7.25 million bytes on a single removable disk pack consisting of six platters.

I never met the first, but my dad showed me once a client's System/360 installation in Hamburg. He worked as system specialist for IBM, and introduced me to electronics and computers. I remember, not so fondly, when he brought "homework" along, consisting of a "hex dump" from core memory printed on endless paper, a stack one or two inches thick, which he analysed for system programming errors (all in assembler I think).

~Hans

[WyoBadger]

My first computer:


I was SUCH hot stuff when I upgraded to the C128. And anybody else remember how excited their dad was when he got a tower with a 40 meg hard drive?

Sometimes I like to tell my students that when I was a kid there was no internet. No home computers. No cell phones. One kid asked "What did you DO?" I answered, "We played outside!" But perhaps this is closer to the real answer.

[Denny]

I remember, not so fondly, when he brought "homework" along, consisting of a "hex dump" from core memory printed on endless paper, a stack one or two inches thick, which he analysed for system programming errors (all in assembler I think).

My mother had the same problems. Ya, assembler.

And anybody else remember how excited their dad was when he got a tower with a 40 meg hard drive?

Father? He had enough issues with the phonograph.

I was pretty happy about the 40 meg though....

[gonzo914]

First computer in about 1985 -- an Atari 800XL (click image for specs).



I used an Atariwriter cartridge to word process. Not a bad little program for its day.



I started out with a tape drive because disk drives cost about a month's pay. It took about 15 minutes to load a 20-page term paper. If your paper was any bigger, you had to chain files together because the computer only had 64k memory.

I finally got an Atari 1050 disk drive -- whole bushels of storage -- 127k in enhanced density mode.


And a Star Microtronics SG-10 "near-letter-quality" dot matrix printer.



I used these into the early 1990s, when they were finallly replaces by a Macintosh Classic 2.

[BigDavy]

First computer


Second computer


First home computer.


next one

next one

next one

next few

Final Atari

Boring PCs since then

David

[dwest]

First computer.


Second computers:


Third computer:

[Innocent Bystander]

My first home computer was the Sinclair ZX81 - the black one. It used audi-casette tapes for storage. I could never get the damn things to work. The only programs I ran were those I typed in from scratch, every time. Short ones.

My first Work computer was a PDP-11 running George 3.


Mercifully, I have forgotten all but the name.

The one that sticks in my memory is the Sirius Micro. It was intended to be a "Serious" business machine (geddit?). Unfortunately, quality control on the floppy-disk drives was not what it should have been, and writing (and reading) a floppy on one machine was no guarantee that you could read the data on another machine. We found this one day when I was transferring the system from one machine to another. It wouldn't. That spiked the project.

I recently volunteered for an organization that gave me standard letters etc on a floppy disk!
Amazing! Not only that, but my wife insisted we got a machine that reads floppy disks! So I could read it! Yes, it matched what I could download from their website... good thing too...

[DCrom]

The hard drive in my first computer, a PC-XT was a whopping 10 megabites!

My first job when I left college in 1980 was working for a now-gone company (Onyx Systems, for any who've heard of it) that made serious business computers. As I recall, our price range went from $10,000 to ~$40,000 for systems - in big, fat 1980 dollars.

Which meant, among other things, that they had your choice of 10, 20, or 40 Megabyte hard drives. The drives used 8" disks and were about the size of a large shoebox. And each capacity increment added several thousand dollars to the system cost. The drives were expensive enough that we had our own clean bench so we could open them and perform minor repairs rather than return them to the factory. And I got my start in systems programming by writing simple test routines for drives under repair.

I can now go down to my local electronics shop and buy much more rugged USB drives with faster access and a thousand times the capacity for under $20. I have several in my pocket right now. And hard drives are relatively high end devices - much faster, with enormously larger storage than USB drives - that sell in the hideously expensive $50-$500 range.

The scale-and-price ramp for CPU power is a similar bogglement.