[rescue] $35 50gig drives

[Charles Shannon Hendrix]

Wed, 04 May 2005 @ 13:28 -0700, Sheldon T. Hall said:

> 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 ...

I started out with a 64K Atari 800, at least that was the first machine
I owned.  Otherwise I started out mostly on DEC systems I logged into
over a 300bps modem, since I couldn't get access to a computer any other
way.

48K of data took as long as a half-hour to load/save from tape.

My first floppy drive was a $350 1050, which stored 90K normally, with a
115K extended mode.

Going from tape to random access media like that was amazing.

I didn't have enough money to get a hard drive for any system I owned
until 1991, though of course I got to use them in school and work.

However, in 1985 I did visit a guy who had a hard drive for this Atari,
a Corvus or something I think.  It was amazing.  Then around 1989 a guy
showed me an Atari 130XE with an expansion box, and it had a pair of
10MB drives, and ran SpartaDOS.  Amazing.

My first personal "UNIX" system was a 286PC running Coherent. Later I
made that a 386 PC with 5MB RAM, and a 40MB hard drive (Seagate 251-1).
I remember complaining about fvwm being too much of a RAM hog...

I wanted a Sun, but even used units were far over my budget.  The PC 
was too, but the one advantage of the PC world then was the ability
to upgrade slowly, and find awesome deals if you were willing to 
hit computer shows and build it all yourself.

Of course, most modern computers show prices aren't that great, but in
the late 80s you could pay as little as 30% what a retail location would
charge you.


-- 
shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- [javalin: an unwieldy programming weapon used
to stab a software project through the heart until dead]