Anyone want to buy a hard drive?

[skiny]

Also available 5 MB for only $2898.00!



So at $339.80 per MB my 500 GB hard drive is worth almost 175 million dollars.

 

[me_and_ed]

I can clearly remember getting a new system for my parts catalogue in 1995 or so (around there), it was 1 GB, back then the pitch was it would take a million years to fill it up, I had to order from Texas back then and it was about $6500, I just picked up a TB external for $159.

 

[chayton]

lol funny - the first computer I bought was a Mac with a 25mhz processor and a 250MB hard drive. Cost me $2400. The company we worked for bought one of the first Kodak digital cameras they made - 3 megapixel for $12K and you had to spend hours cleaning up the pics.

Great, now I feel OLD.

 

[Perc]

I just bought a game that was 50GB, and installed it on a 2TB internal HD that cost about $130 (worth almost 680 million if it was still $339.80 per MB).

It's getting to be about $50 per TB now (except for 1TB drives.. not much difference in price compared to 2TB drives), you can get 4TB drives for around $200.

But these mechanical drives are old tech now, and a bottleneck for newer PC's. Solid State Drives are where it's at these days, still fairly expensive but they do make a big difference.

I have two SSD's, one for Windows/programs (240GB) and one for games (120GB). I only use the 2TB drive for storage, and some games (like the new Wolfenstein) that are too big.

I see a Samsung 1TB SSD on sale for $550 (regular $700), with better read/write speeds than Intel's 800GB SSD for $2000, nice to see size going up and price going down so much already.

Wonder how long it will take for mechanical drives to go up in price again. Once SSD's are big enough and cheap enough, demand for mechanical drives will drop significantly, so we may be close to the lowest price point right now.

 

[skiny]

This image was basically my first computer except I had the more annoying green monochrome screen.



It was an 8088 with dual 5 1/4 inch floppies and no hard drive.

My first hard drive was one of these 10 mb jobs but by then the 286's were out so I could get one pretty cheap.

 

[slotplayer]

My first pc around 1985 was a 4.77 mhz XT clone with a turbo mode of 8 mhz. 640K of memory. No windows back then.

I paid around $800 total for it at a Ken Gordon computer show. The rgb monitor was $350.

The hard drive was Segate 20 meg and I later upgraded it to a 30 meg.
Back then you had 3 colors in graphics mode and 16 colors in text mode.

 

[dunover]

We Brits were lucky having Clive Sinclair - I actually had this in 1980 when a small lad:



Paid £15 for it brand new from a mate, must've fell off the back of a lorry!

It used basic, so the first program I ever wrote was:

10 "PRINT Bollocks!"
20 "GOTO 10"

Obviously this meant your screen would just fill and continuously scroll with 'bollocks' which we thought hysterical at the time...

P.S. Not so funny was a few years back when I asked my dad (seeing as boxed they were going for hundreds on feebay) was it still stored in the garage?
He told me he chucked it out about 10 years before.....

 

[skiny]

I wrote in basic as well.

I had no money for programs so I wrote my own.

I remember writing a word processor so I could do my homework. lol

I wrote a video poker game and a horse racing game before I had a video card. It was all done with ascii characters.

Fun times.

 

[chayton]

....and some games (like the new Wolfenstein) that are too big.

oh yeah that's another thing - I saw the commercial for this and I was like, "That was the first computer game I ever played and it came ON FLOPPIES!"

 

[Mousey]

What baffles me is the failure rate on these new super humongoloid hard drives. I guess it's too much writing to the drive that makes them go?? Too much speed, too much heat, too much use... platter drives should have been long gone and considered antiques years ago. I can't count the number of 500 gig and up externals I've had die on me in the past few years. I never had one of my little hard drives go out on me in the old days. I think I've still got the 30mb one around here somewhere that I bought to use as a secondary drive on sale for the super low discount rate of $175.

 

[skiny]

All this old stuff used to be so expensive. I used to fix and build computers for people I knew so I hated to throw all those old parts out. As time went on I started massing these big boxes of crap. 40 and 80 mb hard drives. 1 and 2 mb simms. IO cards. Video cards. Motherboards. Every conceivable kind of cable or wire.

The bigger the collection got the more obsolete it became. Then one day I just tossed the whole lot of it. The technology advanced so fast, keeping anything for any amount of time was pointless.

I came across my old repair kit a while back stuck in the back of a closet. It had a copy of Win95 and Win98 in it. A dos boot disk, spare ram, some small tools to take the computers apart and of course a pile of little screws that seemed to grow on it's own every time I opened the case.

I probably haven't opened that case in 10 years.

 

[bigjohn]

We Brits were lucky having Clive Sinclair - I actually had this in 1980 when a small lad:

View attachment 47062

Paid £15 for it brand new from a mate, must've fell off the back of a lorry!

It used basic, so the first program I ever wrote was:

10 "PRINT Bollocks!"
20 "GOTO 10"

Obviously this meant your screen would just fill and continuously scroll with 'bollocks' which we thought hysterical at the time...

P.S. Not so funny was a few years back when I asked my dad (seeing as boxed they were going for hundreds on feebay) was it still stored in the garage?
He told me he chucked it out about 10 years before.....

Man, that's a blast from the past.

I had the Timex Sinclair (the US version) for my first computer around '82. It had 2K ram and 2K rom, about the same as in a modern toilet seat! That membrane keyboard was a riot, one button would enter whole BASIC terms like PRINT or RND and it had a little cassette drive for storage.

One of the first things I did was create a rudimentary slot game quite a while before I ever actually played one.

 

[randomiam]

lol

Ive got a John sands sega 3200 still sitting in my shed i wonder if that hard drive comes pre loaded with basic or you have to buy that for $2000

 

[slotplayer]

I wrote in basic as well.

I had no money for programs so I wrote my own.

I remember writing a word processor so I could do my homework. lol

I wrote a video poker game and a horse racing game before I had a video card. It was all done with ascii characters.

Fun times.

yes, the good ole days.

I wrote a slot game called the Liberty Bell Slot (the first slot invented by charles Fey), actually talked to his grandsons Frank and Marshall Fey in Reno NV. I was looking to see if I still had it on my hd to post a screen but could not find it.

Remember sharware? I used to distribute shareware in 1989/90 and made a disk catalog that showed a screen image and some text.
Recognize any of those old programs?

 

[skiny]

I remember when I started running Windows 3.1 I didn't really like running all my dos programs in a Windows shell. Seemed like kind of a waste of resources so I left my computer still booting to the dos menu I wrote.

If I pushed the W key Windows would start and go back to the menu when I shut windows down. From there I would push other keys to start various dos programs. I think all I used Windows for was the word processor and solitaire.

 

[Mark_32Red (retired acct)]

The first computer I remember is a spectrum - but rather than getting me the basic model, my dad thought he was great by upgrading me to the new Spectrum +3. Spent a small fortune.

I was thrilled of course, until I realised I didn't have any friends to swap games with. Nobody else had a disk drive, everyone else used tapes and had 1000's of games because they were easily copied. My dad spent so much on the computer I was left with 2 or 3 games!

Mark

 

[skiny]

The first computer I remember is a spectrum - but rather than getting me the basic model, my dad thought he was great by upgrading me to the new Spectrum +3. Spent a small fortune.

I was thrilled of course, until I realised I didn't have any friends to swap games with. Nobody else had a disk drive, everyone else used tapes and had 1000's of games because they were easily copied. My dad spent so much on the computer I was left with 2 or 3 games!

Mark

I like the huge 128K on the top.

The picture of it is almost 24k.