1Gb 20 years ago

[Potemkin]

http://www.toxicjunction.com/pictures/pic/5/P1485-1.jpg

[A.T. Hagan]

And now I have a 2 gig nerd stick that's half the length of my thumb that I paid fifteen bucks for at the Sam's Club. And it's not even cutting edge.

.....Alan.

[rb.]

:lol: My kids' FIRST iPods got more gigs than our first Mac we bought in 99. And I thought it was sooooo hot.

[Potemkin]

I remember at a conference where a large computer company was the first out with a 1Ghz cpu in 1998/1999 and showed it on a large screen running through some task.

There were several simultaneous nerdgasms in the audience.

Now? Who cares. I have a 2.6Ghz (IIRC) quad core as my home surfing/e-mail machine.

[Oric]

oh my keychain !!!

[rb.]

:laugh: :funnypost:

[RobT20]

At the time, that type of disk drive cost about $30,000 each.

[neilyoungfan]

Rob-
Is that a 3380?

[rb.]

My soon-to-be 14 year old's eyes just popped out of here head when I asked about her iPod, and showed her this. :rofl:

[Auburn Boy]

That is indeed a 3380 Head Disk Assembly!!!

I used to assemble head/arm assemblies for them.

Haven't seen one in 20 years!

From the IBM Archive:

In September 1987, IBM announced a significant extension to the 3380 series: the Model K DASD that stored 7.5 billion characters of information, and the densest disk device IBM ever manufactured; and the high-speed Model J, which could locate data faster than any previous 3380 DASD. The Model J found the correct information track in an average time of just 12 thousandths of a second. Customers who installed Model Js, which could store 2.5 billion characters of data, could upgrade it to the denser Model K.

[Potemkin]

My soon-to-be 14 year old's eyes just popped out of here head when I asked about her iPod, and showed her this. :rofl:

http://thisbluemarble.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=1106&stc=1&d=1235443030
Well, show her this. 15Mb

[neilyoungfan]

Auburn Boy-
I spent a lot of years in Data Centers with IBM 3370/3380/3390 technology. That hardware was unbelievably expensive when it was first introduced. But boy, it was very reliable and we could sort/merge/store a lot of data with that stuff!

[RobT20]

Auburn Boy-
I spent a lot of years in Data Centers with IBM 3370/3380/3390 technology. That hardware was unbelievably expensive when it was first introduced. But boy, it was very reliable and we could sort/merge/store a lot of data with that stuff!
I have a similar background. I also worked with 3340s, which had removable 70MB cartridges, and 3330s, which had removable 100 MB cartridges.

Boy, that was ages ago.

Those were the days when a single megabyte (not gigabyte) on an IBM mainframe was a cool 1 million dollars.

[Oric]

1GB 40 years ago ... All of blackwood forest as punched cards :)

[Mama Alanna]

64K is all the memory you'll ever need!

[jason]

http://img.ircimages.com/ircimages/c/d/cd2d4776818336489fecebc2ef293194.jpg

[jason]

http://img.ircimages.com/ircimages/e/8/e8b149cb14a41e8f68e7c0ce7de20847.jpg

[jason]

Hard disk? We don't need no stinking hard disk.

http://img.ircimages.com/ircimages/3/3/339a6572a6249134cadec8eb5582f280.jpg



Slightly off topic :)

http://img.ircimages.com/ircimages/9/0/90b42e15b4702e8bab6a9de5730192e6.jpg

[Potemkin]

HOT 70ms seek time hard drive!

[neilyoungfan]

Rob-
At my very first Data Processing job (for you youngsters...what IT used to be called) we had the then state-of-the-art IBM 3340's attached to a 370/168. We called them "Winchesters", which apparently was the IBM code name. Wikipedia has a great article with photos on IBM disk storage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_IBM_disk_storage

[A.T. Hagan]

Aren't we on a nostalgia trip! :lol:

The TRS80 models I and II were what I learned on. Couldn't buy one of my own, but I used them a lot. The first micro I ever bought for myself was the Commodore 64.

Had a chance to play with a Texas Instruments for a time. Can't recall the model number any more. It was a good machine, but they supported it badly.

.....Alan.

[Mama Alanna]

Our first, I think it was an 8088. Computer, keyboard, and green monitor, all in one. We had WordStar for word processing, some simple text-based games, and not a lot more. The second had a 20mg hard-drive, and DH said it would take years and years to fill it up. "Years and years" turned out to be about 3 years.

[rootdiggr]

Our first computer - The Adam

http://oldcomputers.net/adam.html

Please notice the dual tape drives.

[Auburn Boy]

My first?

I wire wrapped a Z80 System on an S-100 backplane. It had 4K of RAM.

I designed the I/O, the control panel, the power supplies. The CPU was built on a BYTE S-100 board, the memory likewise.

All it could do was run some simple math programs that had to be hand entered in Hexidecimal, and read out on LEDs.

:rofl:

[Oric]

My first computer was Oric Atmos .. Can you tell ?

[Arianwen]

I used a Commodore 64 in elementary school. :D

My first puter of my very own was a Pentium 233 with like 32 mb of Ram and I forget how big (small) the hard drive capacity was. I think it had Win98 on it.

I bought a 16(!)gig SDHC card for my DSLR for $20.00CAD over Xmas... SIXTEEN GIGs! It can hold I think 12,000 RAW images! HAHAHAHAHAHA

[Brihard]

The first computer we had was a 286. We got a 386 a few years later (the first computer we had that I actually remember), and then a few years after that I remember how excited I was that dad was upgrading it to a 486. The rest is fairly recent history.

Still, at least I'm in early enough that I'll be able to tell my kids I was around when the internet first started to go mainstream.

[spinnerholic]

My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer with all of 4K. Had a gizmo I laid the phone into to connect with the net. All programs and back up was done with cassette tapes. I upgraded from 4k to 16K and then to 64K. Then bought a 288.

I used to write programs in Basic, and all computers used DOS as an operating system. Then I bought and Assembly language compiler and wrote programs in that horrific language. You can get ditsy quick dealing with nothing but zeros and ones. And trouble shooting a bug in one of those programs was something to brag about. It was sheer hell to find the blasted thing.

My, how time does fly! Taking all trips in covered wagons, walking to school 5 miles uphill both ways, and fighting off a T-rex or two every week or so really took so much time away from my new computer addiction.

[RobT20]

My first?

I wire wrapped a Z80 System on an S-100 backplane. It had 4K of RAM.

I designed the I/O, the control panel, the power supplies. The CPU was built on a BYTE S-100 board, the memory likewise.

All it could do was run some simple math programs that had to be hand entered in Hexidecimal, and read out on LEDs.

:rofl:
I still have my Altair 8080 in the closet someplace. It came as a kit, you had to solder everything together yourself. The real trick was to get it to actually work after all the bad soldering. That's when I bought a used oscilloscope and and learned very basic troubleshooting.

Entering a program in binary with the front panel switches became a little tedious, but it was a real learning experience.

I remember bringing the kit home and spreading all the parts out on the kitchen table, and then excitedly calling some friends over to see my new toy. I don't think they understood at all what it was and why I thought it was so exciting. C'est la vie.

[gsgs]

ZX81 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_ZX81) with 1KB of RAM, so strange tricks were being used to keep the programs short

[Potemkin]

I still have my Altair 8080 in the closet someplace. It came as a kit, you had to solder everything together yourself. The real trick was to get it to actually work after all the bad soldering. That's when I bought a used oscilloscope and and learned very basic troubleshooting.

Entering a program in binary with the front panel switches became a little tedious, but it was a real learning experience.

I remember bringing the kit home and spreading all the parts out on the kitchen table, and then excitedly calling some friends over to see my new toy. I don't think they understood at all what it was and why I thought it was so exciting. C'est la vie.


I never bought one but I bought plenty of Tandy kits and put them together.

You get real good at reading directions properly and checking for cold solders. ;)

[RobT20]

I never bought one but I bought plenty of Tandy kits and put them together.

You get real good at reading directions properly and checking for cold solders. ;)
Agreed, I quickly determined that it's better to go slow and do the soldering right the first time. One bad solder joint could take several hours to figure out.

[RobT20]

[just ran across this, very timely for this thread, and a good read]

Computer Data Storage Through the Ages -- From Punch Cards to Blu-Ray
Posted 03/02/09 at 11:30:00 AM | by Paul Lilly

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/news/computer_data_storage_through_ages

Your next build may very well come configured with dual-SSD drives in a RAID 0 array for the OS, a gluttonous 2TB SATA HDD for storage duties, and a Blu-ray optical drive for movie watching and HD backups. And for quick transfers from one rig to another, does it get any sweeter than a 64GB USB thumb drive loaded with all of your favorite apps? Such a storage scheme is certainly worthy of dream machine status, but our storage options weren't always as fanciful, fast, and fat as they are today. Some of you may remember toting a 3.5-inch floppy to and from school, while others hearken all the way back to cassette tapes. And if you've lived long enough to remember the IBM Punch Card first hand, just ask and we'll SPEAK LOUDER.

Fasten your seatbelt and take a trip back in time with us as we follow the evolution of computer storage from its earliest days, all the way up to now.
...

[go to the link, it's really the best way to view this article, many images]

[gsgs]

does the data in those old memories still exist or did time
destroy it ?

----edit---------
what's the record for the oldest still readable harddrive-data
or floppy-data or cassete-recorder-data ?

I stored data in 1983 on music-cassettes, those are no longer readable.
It might depend on the cassette-type

[Auburn Boy]

does the data in those old memories still exist or did time
destroy it ?

I have 24 year old 8 inch floppies that I can still read. They hold a whopping 64 KB of data. LOL!!!!

I have scads of 3.25 floppies that are still readable. But my drive won't format some disks because of a darned archaic track format that an IBM PC Jr. laid down in 1989.

And back to near the original topoic of this thread: I have two 5.25 hard drives that were built and certified (by yours truly) at IBM San Jose in 1991. They are 4GB. They weihg in at near 2 pounds apiece. The price tag for them pupppies was $4800 new.That's $1.2K per gigabyte!! I got them for free though. They wer our "gold standard" test items in our certification lab for firmware development, and were given to me as a going away present by my boss in 1996.

One of them has a functional Windows 3.1 operating system installed! It was a pain in the ass to get DOS and Win 3.1 to recognize the whole hard drive, back then.

But hey, figuring out those kind of things is half the fun of high-tech, isn't it.

[neilyoungfan]

And if you've lived long enough to remember the IBM Punch Card first hand, just ask and we'll SPEAK LOUDER.



Hey! I resemble that remark. And I'm not that old!

[rryan]

My first computer was a Radio Shack Color Computer with all of 4K. Had a gizmo I laid the phone into to connect with the net. All programs and back up was done with cassette tapes. I upgraded from 4k to 16K and then to 64K. Then bought a 288.

I used to write programs in Basic, and all computers used DOS as an operating system. Then I bought and Assembly language compiler and wrote programs in that horrific language. You can get ditsy quick dealing with nothing but zeros and ones. And trouble shooting a bug in one of those programs was something to brag about. It was sheer hell to find the blasted thing.

My, how time does fly! Taking all trips in covered wagons, walking to school 5 miles uphill both ways, and fighting off a T-rex or two every week or so really took so much time away from my new computer addiction.

Acoustic couplers.

I sold a truckload of those to some guy in Turkey who was in turn taking them to someplace in Asia back in the mid 90's.

I won't go into details but i will state that my profit margin was considerably over 1000%

[Glockd]

I spent some time in the pharmaceutical industry, specifically Schein Pharmaceutical in the early 90's. My first job was in glass wash, the wash and sterilization of glass vials, rubber stoppers and screw caps that injectable drugs are poured into in clean rooms. Our stopper washers, large washing machine looking items that we loaded thousands of stoppers into for cleaning before they went into the clean rooms ran on punch cards. Huge plastic punch cards loaded with the info for stopper size, wash time, etc.

A broken card meant a call to Germany for a replacement. Today, I am sure, everything runs on a simple program, but it was state of the art in medical manufacturing then. And all the best stuff came from Germany. Bosch Strunch, Stroebel Cozzinni, etc.