In 1988, I Bought an 80 Megabyte Seagate Hard Drive

[MineralMan]

for $400. I needed it for the BBS system I was running for my shareware software company. It was huge, completely filling the hard drive bay on my PC AT clone. It ran so hot that you couldn't touch the top of the computer case over it. It was also noisy. It made a chuckling sound every time the read/write head arm moved. I was living large!

In 2021, I bought 2 32-Gigabyte micro SD cards for $7.99 on Amazon. I needed one for my new photo slide scanner. I stuffed the other one in my Android phone as extra memory.

Freaking remarkable! That's what that is. That's what we expect from our technology improvements.

Now, if only our society had matured like that and improved itself at that rate in the same amount of time. Wouldn't that be nice?

Maybe, if we never let Republicans back in power, such a thing might be possible.

[marble falls]

1. The one with the buggy whip? I got the one with a hand crank. I had 10 Meg of Ram, too ...

... and a plotter with felt tip pens.

[Miguelito Loveless]

2. Amen on your last point.

The first hard drive I ever saw was an external 5MB ST-506, which Radio Shack was selling as an add on to the Model III, It was on sale for $1,500, or $300 a MB. So, those postage stamp-sized SD cards you bought were worth $9.6 million, if my math is right.

[blugbox]

8. Just to add on to the point you are making...

Postage stamp size would be a regular SD card.

He said Micro SD, which are about the size of your pinky nail. Even more incredible!

BTW, they make Micro SD cards up to 1TB now! That's over 1000 Gigabytes.

[bullimiami]

3. I remember getting the first 1GB scsi drive for our Sonic Solutions somewhere around 1990.

1000.00. Remember how huge we thought it was.

[leftieNanner]

4. My first computer was an IBM

with ONE MEG of RAM! It cost me $3,000 (including monitor). That was likely in the late 80s as well.

Now we have more computing capabilities in our phones!

[blugbox]

12. Way more, in fact

The average smart phone these days has 4-8 Gigs of RAM.

I built my PC about five years ago for $3000 and it has 64 Gigs of RAM haha

Obviously that's overkill for normal usage today, but it's used for 3d rendering and video editing, as well as gaming lol.

[ProudMNDemocrat]

17. Amazing, isn't it?

Our phones are hand held computers that we talk through.

I was stoked when Texas Instruments came out with their hand held calculators. Phones have that too.

[leftieNanner]

19. When I was in College

students were not permitted to use the TI calculators in exams because most people couldn't afford them and it would give an unfair advantage. I lived and died by my slide rule!

[ProudMNDemocrat]

20. I did Multiplication and long division on paper.

Still do at times.

[central scrutinizer]

74. I remember the algorithm for extracting square roots by hand

Still have my slide rule but can’t find my circular one. Better estimation because the C and D scales were on the outside so much longer than on a regular one.

[ProfessorGAC]

41. After Good Calculators Came Out...

...I got my hands on a circular slide rule! It was 7.5" in diameter, so it was like a 2 foot straight one. Could easily extrapolate to 5 decimal places.
I almost never used it, except on a couple DiffeQ tests & some kinetic rate tests in PChem, but when I saw it used at the bookstore, I had to have it.
By the time I got into grad school, calculators advanced a lot in a short time. Since we needed them for our job, the company got us all a good HP device (RPN). Then they paid the tuition!
The slide rules became collectables. I have no idea what happened to either of them.

[lastlib]

56. Still have my steel Pickett slide rule!

Ten years ago, I had younger co-workers who had never seen one, so I brought it in one day. It was quite a conversation piece for them!

[ProfessorGAC]

76. I'll Bet

In one of the math classes I subbed (pretty sure it was 8th grade) the teacher had one of those 4' demonstration models hanging above the whiteboard.
I mentioned it, and in the advanced class, a few kids asked how they worked.
Took me 30 seconds of looking at it, and then "ding" it came back.
The kids were fascinated.

[Wednesdays]

80. My first micro computer, Commodore PET, 1978

It had a whopping 8k of RAM. When we first got it, there was NO software available for it so you had to program it yourself from scratch. The cassette tape drive would load a program in about five minutes. For most people, it ran only in BASIC but if you were a geek you could program in machine language.

[piddyprints]

83. OMG...

My brother in-law built his first computer sometime around that time and it had 48k of RAM. I don't know any more than that about it because it's all we heard about. It was a huge deal.

My first computer was an Atari 800 that came with a BASIC cartridge and arcade version of PacMan, back in 1983. I learned to program on my own from that computer and then decided to go back to college and get a degree in it. I still have the Atari 800 and it still works, as far as I know. We had to hook it up to a TV.

[Stuckinthebush]

5. I remember when RAM was gold in the early 90s

We had to lock those sims up to keep them safe.

And yes, we need to never let the GOP back in power because they don't want to have continual improvements in society. They just want to provide opportunities for the richest to become more rich. Period.

[Tommymac]

36. I upgraded my 128K of RAM to 256K and it cost me $350 in 1988.

Had to attach the new chip to the motherboard using those damn metal pins. You had to open the case every month or so to reseat the damn thing as it would eventually come loose due to heat creep. I.E. the metal pins would get hot and expand when the pc was powered up, and cool down when powered off. This would eventually force the pins to come loose.

Ah the good old days.

(Let's not talk about interrupts and com ports, please.)

[dalton99a]

6. When 4MB RAM was plenty

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

54. Dear lord, that is almost exactly what my

first computer, which I think I got in 1991 was.

[kimbutgar]

7. A guy I helped pack up for a move recently had one of those computers with a 512 mb hard drive

His wife wanted him to get rid of it and he refused and at one point they got into a standoff about it. He got to keep that old computer. Later I talked to him about how it was probably worth something and he knew it was worth more than what he originally paid for it. I had an old computer with 256 mb hard drive and got rid of it when I got a 1 gb hard drive! All I did after that was delete files to keep that computer running.

[ProudMNDemocrat]

9. I remember the Floppy disks and DOS

We had an IBM PCjr. In the early 80's.

Now a chip the size of my pinkie finger nail holds more data than the floppy disk holds.

[Mr.Bill]

10. Remember when you had two slots for floppy disks?

And you were the badass on the block.

[TygrBright]

66. ::belly laugh:: I remember the guy at work who had FOUR 5.25 floppy drive ports....

He thought he was the baddest ass around.

The next year I got a new PC with a 3.5" floppy drive.

Remember loading software offa those buggers? They'd come in 10-disc sets and you had to sit there and wait for it to tell you it was ready for the next disc.

But it was way faster than punch tape.

reminiscently,
Bright

[Revanchist]

31. Ha! Floppy drives

I had a commodore 64 with a cassette tape drive

[CaptainTruth]

33. My Timex-Sinclair 2068 had an external cassette drive.

They called the tape a "stringy floppy."

[enki23]

67. That was me. With the CoCo 2.

What's an "operating system?"

[Goonch]

11. While looking for an SSD I came across

EVO SSD 1TB - M.2 NVMe Interface Internal Solid State Drive with V-NAND Technology Solid State Drive
Read Speed 3400 Megabytes Per Second
plugs in to a pci e card slot
Price: $142.99
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-970-EVO-1TB-MZ-V7E1T0BW/dp/B07BN217QG/ref=lp_193870011_1_3

[MineralMan]

13. Yup.

I do total system backups for my PC on a pair of USB thumb drives. I swap between them and run the backup at the end of each day.

I'm not going to lose more than one day's data if the PC dies.

[Mr.Bill]

14. In '82 I was using a Radio Shack TRS-80 at work.

We used it to estimate printing jobs. The hard drive was a cassette deck.

It actually worked rather well. Played backgammon and chess, too.

[Pepsidog]

34. '83 I went to law school with Radio Shack keyboard with some memory and dot matrix printer

and my classmates looked at me like I was from outer space. Taking notes on the keyboard which had some memory. That set up cost about $750.

[intrepidity]

15. I'd be thrilled if I had the *same* memory capacity I had in 1988

:sigh:

But as for my computer, my first hard drive was a massive 4 megabytes.

[Disaffected]

16. The first hard drive I worked with

was about the size of a large bread box and had 32Kb (yes, a K, not a M). It went nicely with 4K RAM.

[Midnightwalk]

18. My computer was so poor it didn't have a cache

16KB of memory, standard cassette tape for storage and a 49 dollar black and white tv for the display.

I splurged on the extra memory to get “high res graphics”. It was an original apple 2 serial number around 200

6502 motorola processor. I think 1MHz for a 1us cycle time. First assembler I learned.

Before that I used a teletype to some system. Storage was paper tape.

[bobalew]

51. Sorry, Motorola didn't make the 6502, Rockwell did.

INTERESTING NOTE: the 6502, was a kit you could buy from the back of Byte Magazine. It was called the "AIM 65 SDK kit", and came with an AIM 65 motherboard with some expansion breadboard circuitry space on it & a 6502 processor. that's what Woz & Jobs had bought back in the day. What Wozniac did was add extra RAM to make it the APPLE 1. I met with & talked to them at the Xerox PARC HBMUG meetings, where I saw it running LISP & a draw program for the very first public viewing. The Motorola part of the first proto, was one of the many broken ATARI monitors Woz took home out of their dumpster, and repaired. I worked also at ATARI, and taught him how to fix them. And BTW, Jobs had not much to do with the technological parts of it. He was ALWAYS the front man. Woz was always the brain behind the whole thing... I have a few more interesting tidbit about that whole APPLE startup thing, and may have had something to do with it, also.....

[Midnightwalk]

71. Interesting to learn

I always heard/thought mororola. From Wiki it sounds like it was an offshoot of the 6800 by a team that left motorola? At the time I had enough learning enough to play with assembler and figuring out the bit twiddling to put a dot on some coordinate on the screen

For me the best thing about the apple was the built in debugger and fw listing. You could call the routine to do built in functions and step thru them until you understood what it was doing. Or at least enough to get further.

It was a great way to learn.

[Yavin4]

21. Moore's Law

We're all living it.

[rickford66]

37. And software and files will fill available space as fast as it's created.

[DSandra]

22. That's what happens when people have all the incentive in the world to work on something

Which goes to show just how underserved the populus has been all this time.

[Codifer]

23. On the other hand...

.. I could have bought a new car in 1967 for 1,800 US$. It was so simple an Idiot could repair them. Now that same make is 40,000 US$ and has a touchy ECU "Brain" that costs 3,000 US$.

Um....have an old VW for sale?

[rampartc]

24. i'm currently working on an old jukebox

with 64 bits of magnetic core. that was very high tech in the 1960s.

[ironflange]

25. My first HDD was 32 MB

Somewhere in the '80s. It was vast, storage as far as the eye could see; I didn't know how I would ever be able to fill it. Felt the same about the 7 GB one i got a few years later. Now I'm always having to trash stuff to keep my SSD from filling up.

[BootinUp]

26. Another marvel

The original HDD in my 2011 asus laptop. Knock wood. Keeps on spinning baby.

[Silent3]

28. Adjusted for inflation, that drive cost you about $890 in today's dollars.

Last edited Wed Mar 10, 2021, 05:27 PM - Edit history (1)

So the storage cost about $11.12/MB, or $11,400/GB.

Your new purchase was $0.000122/MB, $0.125/GB.

That's about 91,000 times cheaper today, not even considering matters of speed and reliability and power consumption and portability.

[csziggy]

78. Back in the late 1990s I taught myself how to build computers by rebuilding old ones

Lots of times, the only thing wrong was that they needed new hard drives. At that point used hard drives cost roughly a dollar per MB. When I could, I scavenged drives out of other computers - I was getting most of those for free from family and trash. Then I had to find operating systems and basic software for doing word processing, games and other stuff.

Windows User Groups were a great resource - they would share old versions of Windows that they no longer needed as well as the other software. On the other hand, when I was donated a big pile of Apple computers, the Apple group was not helpful at all and I had to trash the entire lot. Although my first computer had been an Apple, I grew to detest Apple computers, the company, and the users because of this.

All the computers I rebuilt were given to people who could not afford a computer at all, mostly families with kids. I wasn't in it for the money, but for learning.

[Cirque du So-What]

29. I used a 'luggable' Compaq 8088 in the early '80s for uploading to programmable logic controllers

I finally got approval for a 20 MB 'hard card' that took up a full expansion slot. I remember thinking that it was nearly infinite in its storage capacity.

[tandem5]

30. Ha! 80MB! It was a pretty good day when you got a stack of 80 byte punch cards, a paper clip

and a palette of butcher paper to flowchart your Fortran program!

[burrowowl]

32. When I upgraded my MAC II to an FX

one Meg of RAM and 40 Meg of hard drive, wow what to do with all that space.

[Cheezoholic]

35. I upgraded my IBM XT

with 1 megabyte of RAM back then. The card was bigger than the 51/4 inch "true" floppy disks lol. Cost was 799.00. Still have the receipt and every PC I've ever owned.

[CaptainTruth]

38. You're bringing back memories!

I started with a Timex-Sinclair 2068, & upgraded to an IBM PC with 2 floppy drives. Eventually got a 20 MB Seagate drive & I remember thinking that 20 MB was so much space I would never fill it! That was massive!!! LOL

[William Seger]

39. My first progamming job in the early 80s...

... we had a computer room with about 20 disk drives that were about the size of washing machines, and I wouldn't even want to guess what they cost. Even though each had a stack of 9 platters about a foot in diameter, they only held 450MB, so each or your cards has more capacity than that room full of drives -- and they're probably faster, too.

[bucolic_frolic]

40. These things don't happen politically for a couple reasons (that I can think of - but surely

there are more).

1) Parties in power become complacent and their base loses energy. At the point of maximum power they feel invincible, but are at their most vulnerable moment. Democrats were like that in the 1970s. We thought civil rights were on one trajectory and couldn't conceive of anyone thinking otherwise. The pendulum swings.

2) There is opposition. The other side goes to work, not to mention the ups and downs of the economy and international intrigue. Democrats must learn they're being played all the time. Nixon sandbagged Paris Peace Talks? Reagan's minions had a secret deal in Iran? Bush in Iran-Contra? GWB saw WMDs where his guys said they were? Trump-Russia 2016? Ukraine 2020? Insurrection by turncoats? Hello? Anyone see a pattern? The other party is triangulating us into oblivion. We must pay attention and stop governing like peace-niks.

[Marcuse]

42. FORTRAN, COBOL and punch cards.

[MineralMan]

53. Yup. I took a Fortran class in 1963.

[Jarqui]

61. Been there, done that.

Teletype terminals that send punched tape too ...

Even programming, some processors could only handle a handful bytes at a time so you would have to structure your code accordingly. And you'd have to stack various outcomes, etc and whittle them all down in some logical order to get your answer type stuff.

I recall a 100 MB hard disk (which seemed AMAZING/mind boggling when it came out) being around $200,000 and 64K RAM also being around that price (very roughly). I still have the quotes somewhere.

An IBM mainframe I worked on in the early 80s had many tall bookshelves of 1/2"-3" binders full of documentation on the system. It was hundreds of binders. I worked on it for a few years - not full time. You'd start in one binder and it would send you to another and another ... you might go through 20-40 binders ... but you always got your answer. It was like an army of them worked out every conceivable path in advance. Incredible.

There's more going on in your cell phone than the biggest IBM super mainframe of the 60-70s.

And we're just getting started ...

[PCIntern]

43. I had an ADAM computer

With oversized “cassette” tape drives! One for booting, the other for processing.

[ProfessorGAC]

44. About 4 Years Ago, My Company Gave Me...

...a 1.8 terabyte drive that I kept on my desk.
A little bigger than a paperback.
Their cost to buy was $140.
When I retired, the IT guy told me to keep it. I gave him my souped up laptop, my iPhone, my security badges (4, covering 18 locations, plus corporate HQ), but not the terra drive.
Not sure what I'm going to do with it, but I have it.

[Lucky Luciano]

45. Shit, I routinely use data files bigger than that!! LOL

[AllaN01Bear]

46. i started with a 286 with dual floppies . and that was the one with 2 floppy drives .

1 was for the os , and the other was for apps and or storage . then it was upgraded to a 386 with a 10 meg hd that crashed everytime the weather changed . your thoughts are valid.

[getagrip_already]

47. even better.. in 1980 DEC was selling the RK05 - a 5 MB pack drive system

For close to $50k. But hey, the drive pack was removeable! Iy had several 18" platters stacked on top of each other. A whole 5MB of storage.....

[Aussie105]

48. Went to Uni as a young man.

Did a statistics class.
Hand crank calculator machines.
Calculators, computers, mobile phones hadn't arrived yet.

Went back the other day, as an old man.
Basement of the library - one vast computer room.

Uni students still look dopey though, that hasn't changed.
But oh my, they are so young!
Where is the diaper change room? Must be one somewhere, surely?

[AwakeAtLast]

49. My husband does computer work for people as a side job.

He purchased a brand new CPU to play around with and to show to potential customers. It's the size of a large wallet!

Totally agree with you about the rate of improvement, we would be living like kings!

[MineralMan]

52. Yikes!

[dalton99a]

64. +1. Inside:

Cutaway:



Comparison:

[George II]

55. Right around the same time (1989 I believe) I bought one for work that was....

....only 52 megabytes and it cost over $500.

About six months ago I bought a Western Digital 2T drive for $60 on Amazon.

[Victor_c3]

57. In 1999 I bought an IBM Thinkpad laptop for $4,700

It was pretty tricked out, I forget the exact specs but it was near the top of their line at the time. This last Christmas, I bought a top tier Lenovo Thinkpad for about $1,500 for my daughter.

It’s incredible how much more computer you get for substantially less money than you were getting even 21 years ago.

[LPBBEAR]

58. Ahh the memories......

My first computer was a 386 running DrDos. Loved it! Then we got a store bought 486 Packard Bell running Windows/MsDos with 4 mb later upgraded to 8 mb. Cost for that extra 4 mb was around $400 as I remember. Later ran a BBS using GAP BBS. Ahh what fun. Legend of the Red Dragon anyone?

After that I gradually moved into Linux which is where I have been ever since. I can only handle Windows in small doses and only if I'm paid to work on it.

Run a number of game servers (Tribes and Unreal) as well as worked on a games called "Legends" at one point. You can find that in the Internet Archive.

An excellent TV series that will really bring back the period is "Halt And Catch Fire". Apparently its available on Netflix and as a pay for on Prime.

Also caught a really interesting flick on the rise of Compaq yesterday called "The Silicon Cowboys". Its on Filmrise through various sources.

[WarGamer]

59. technology is simple... humans, not so much.

[LeftInTX]

60. In 1988, you were way ahead of your time!!!

[Oldem]

62. New rule. Draw up a list of 1000 outmoded, phony, lying, racist, etc. repug

talking points and a list of 1000 sensible, progressive, humane, etc. positions. With every advancement in technology, in any field, every repug will have to renounce one from the 1st list and embrace one from the 2nd list. Impractical, even ridiculous, I know--but fun. Sort of like science fiction.

[BumRushDaShow]

63. I remember buying a 20MB "hard card"

(drive was on a card that used one of the slots) and also bought a 128K video RAM expansion stick to take the total RAM to 768K, plus eventually got a VGA card and VGA monitor for my Tandy 1000 TL (that was back in 1988/89).

Played lots of King Quest IV on it!

(now I have a NAS with a couple TB of storage for my network that includes a couple i7 laptops, one with a 1GB eSATA drive and the other with I think, a 525MB SSD )

[Laha]

65. I love this thread

I'm an old nerd too. But many of you way out class me.

[jmowreader]

68. In 1990, one of the IT guys in my unit told me I shouldn't buy a 300MB hard drive

Said there was so much space on one I'd never be able to find all my files. So, I went with a 120MB drive.

Now, I have many files that are bigger than 300MB.

[suilebhan]

69. Moore's Law for Society

How about 20mb in 1985 for $500.00? That was the price added to my first IBM compatible purchase, bringing the total to 2000.00.

I'd love to see a societal Moore's Law, but it requires the absence of our current GQP. The only way we can have nice things again is sans Republicans.

[mac2766]

70. 32 Mb of RAM...

At $45 per meg. Ouch.
17" CRT for $1,000, again... ouch
A 32 bit flat screen scanner with proprietary SCSI bus for $2400. Again... Need I say, ouch!

And on and on and on...

Man I loved those days. So expensive but what a great time it was.

I had the first computer with a gigabyte of HDD space. Was an 800MB plus a 200MB HDD. I remember people coming to my office to take a look at my system. It was amazing. I was a celebrity. In my building that is.

[videohead5]

72. I bought my first

Hard drive in 1998 when I built my first computer. It was a 2gb Seagate. The last one I built for myself has an M.2 MVME drive in it. It boots in 10 to 15 seconds. It's unreal how fast computers are now.

[Worsel]

73. my first home computer had 8k of memory

I bought a Bally Home Library computer in 77 for, I think, $300. It had 8K RAM and accepted 4K cartridges, mostly games. One cartridge was a TinyBASIC compiler that came out in 78. You multipunched on a small keypad to enter code.

I bought a kit to expand the RAM to 16K. It had 9 chips and a few other components that had to be soldered by me to a circuit board. I remember spending $100. The whole 8K expansion with case was a little smaller than a deck of cards.

I remember writing a submarine game that shot torpedoes at ships appearing randomly at the top of the TV screen and traversing the screen in both directions. The game was written in machine code and TinyBASIC POKEd into RAM one hex byte at a time, no compiler. The game was several hundred bytes, a lot of which were supervisor calls and sprites.

This wasn't that much different than what I was doing at work, writing assembler programs for IBM mainframes and various mini computers. I started in 73 on an IBM 360/30 that cost a fortune and had 64K memory and 160 MB of disk ( if memory serves ). All of the IBM software was free, but the hardware cost of the mainframe far exceeded the cost of the entire programing staff.

[csziggy]

75. About the same time I bought a 40 Mb hard drive for my PC AT clone

Since I was on DOS 3.1, the drive had to formated and partitioned in to two parts - otherwise DOS could not see all of the drive. I think the limit then was 32 Mb. I can't remember for certain, but I think that computer came with a 10 Mb hard drive. It was a HUGE upgrade over my original Apple ][ that had no hard drive but had been upgraded to two - count them, TWO - 5.25 floppy drives so you could run a program off one and save the data on the other, all at the same time. That Apple came with a whole 48k of RAM.

My computer today has 32 GB of RAM and 10 TB of hard drives.

[Marcuse]

77. Vintage.

[unc70]

79. Maybe trying to "win" the thread

MM you and I have been around this industry a long time. "My" first hard drive was 32k 12-bit words on a PDP-8. Much better than paper tape or DECtape. With a later upgrade to 64KW (!) hard disk and 8KW of main memory, we had a 6-8 user timeshare system.

Must admit that at a similar time I also worked on early IBM 360 models, IBM 1620, IBM 1130, and LGP-30.

Actually have in storage many of these and similar vintage systems. Would love to discuss things back when we thought we were special!

[Tracyjo]

81. Wow You guys are wild!

I didn't even have a computer until 2000! Don't even remember what it was. Gateway something....

[wackadoo wabbit]

82. My very first computer didn't have a hard drive

They weren't a thing for personal computers back in the early '80s. Hell, personal computers were barely a thing back then!

It ran CP/M — which was a far superior operating system to DOS, IMO — off a floppy. I think it's safe to say that things have come a long way since then.