[rescue] $35 50gig drives

Sheldon T. Hall shel at tandem.artell.net
Wed May 4 15:28:58 CDT 2005


Wes Will said ...
[snip]
> Next on the rise to storage heaven was my first hard disk.  It weighed
> about a zillion pounds, an "Apple Sider" drive, and I had me
> a whopping 5 megabytes of storage.  When it arrived, I was the MAN!!
> Who could POSSIBLY fill up 5 MEGS?!

Who, indeed!

My first hard drive was a Corvus Constellation.  5 Megabytes.  $5,000.  That
was so much storage we networked it to three TRS-80 Mod II computers ...

When I was with http://www.cdci.com in the late 70s, we had quite a few
customers running their businesses on TRS-80 Mod II computers, running CP/M
on their single 8" floppy disk drives.  The big spenders bought the
extension cabinet with three more 8" drives so they could do faster backups.

That wasn't the first computer I worked on, though.  That would be an NCR
315.  56 kilobytes of 12-bit "slabs".  Real wound core memory.  Vacuum tubes
in the paper tape reader.  CRAM cards.  No OS at all, just whatever program
you were running.  All the I/O, including the remote terminals, were just
memory locations you had to poll.  Programming language was "NEAT".  We ran
a half-billion dollar bank on that thing....

-Shel



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