" One Gigabyte: Then and Now "

[looseliam]

omigawd I want one!!

I still have a 512k memory expansion card that is 18"x10"

But judging from the colour of the plates I'd have to say it's from the 80's.

 

[Negasta]

You must have needed your own small nuclear reactor to power that thing

 

[Jannus]

The photo above has been making the rounds recently. I thought it was a fake at first. I've been working around computers for decades and have never seen anything like it. In fact, it isn't near as big as it appears at first glance.

It's said to be a belt-driven IBM hard drive from about 1987. The picture is from a display at Festival računalništva in sodobnih komunikacij (FRiSK 2007) in Slovenia. You may see the whole gallery of old computer stuff here:

http://www.sobotainfo.com/index.php?mode=gallery&gid=12863

 

[LaloGS]

I remember my first hard drive was a whopping 8MB. Now it's a small 250GB. What are we doing with all this memory space?

 

[provenlogic]

I took apart an old 80's HDD like the one noelie did too, so i can at least confirm the orange-brown color is definately an 80's design. And the size of the 1GB drive rings pretty true with me as far as i would imagine. Obviously it wasn't for home computers, but for mainframes and supercomputers.

 

[mike_n_herrin]

Courting disaster and heartache, fooling ourselves that we've never had it better, getting further and further away from nature and reality?

Or collecting porn.

i think you are right. i read in maximumpc that people have shifted to a "keep everything" mentality so that crap they don't need isn't deleted.

also we are keeping more electronic stuff like videos (instead of VHS tapes), jpgs instead of photographs, and mp3s instead of CDs/cassette tapes. we have fooled ourselves into thinking these are safer and that we are not going to loose data. but all hard drives will fail eventually so the larger the drive the more we ARE going to loose at some point. hopefully folks have stuff backed up but i'm not foolish enough to actually believe that. i however do have all 300 GB of my doctor who episodes backedup!

 

[provenlogic]

i think you are right. i read in maximumpc that people have shifted to a "keep everything" mentality so that crap they don't need isn't deleted.

also we are keeping more electronic stuff like videos (instead of VHS tapes), jpgs instead of photographs, and mp3s instead of CDs/cassette tapes. we have fooled ourselves into thinking these are safer and that we are not going to loose data. but all hard drives will fail eventually so the larger the drive the more we ARE going to loose at some point. hopefully folks have stuff backed up but i'm not foolish enough to actually believe that. i however do have all 300 GB of my doctor who episodes backedup!

Which is why i've taken to stone etching my data! Stone, as a medium, is surprisingly robust and error-resistant. However, it is somewhat of a backwards shift in the area of size to data ratio. But knowing that my porn and stupid videos of roller-skating dogs will be around for thousands of years is somewhat of a comfort. Lately though, my hands and arms have been getting rather tired, and i think i need to upgrade my chisel; the new perpendicular hammering versions are out, and i hear they went up from an 8" length to a 16"! The only downside is watching video on stone is really slow, it's like the frames move at a stone's pace...

 

[nuttsy1la]

The last time I was at my parents place I was digging through my stored crap there and came across my first 8088 PC. It had two 5.14" floppy drives and NO hard drive. The OS booted off drive A, and B was used for my apps and such. With a whopping 512k of memory I was the envy of the block. *laughs* wow how times have changed, my MacBook Pro and my Mini are light years past that. Hell my Mini has 3.4TB attached to it right now --- I think if someone would have told me I'd have 3.4TB sitting under my TV I'd have pissed myself right there.

Anyhow the drive platters are from the 80's - I have a friend that worked at IBM that is now with EMC and they have platters up on the walls at his old building as examples. Insane...

 

[looseliam]

*scratched head*

I think I still have my 8088. Or was it an 8086?

I know I have one of them in the attic.

Last time I turned it on, it ran like it used to.

I'll pull it out this week and see if it still works.

=]

 

[levenshulme31]

At some point in the not too distant future the entire sum of human knowledge, endeavour, folly and life will be stored on something the size of a fingernail.




















Which will be promptly lost forever down the back of the sofa.

 

[Spiff]

1 GB is nothing nowadays, at least that's Microsoft's philosophy. Heck, Vista consumes that much with each system restore point that it automatically creates.

 

[mike_n_herrin]

Which is why i've taken to stone etching my data! Stone, as a medium, is surprisingly robust and error-resistant. However, it is somewhat of a backwards shift in the area of size to data ratio. But knowing that my porn and stupid videos of roller-skating dogs will be around for thousands of years is somewhat of a comfort. Lately though, my hands and arms have been getting rather tired, and i think i need to upgrade my chisel; the new perpendicular hammering versions are out, and i hear they went up from an 8" length to a 16"! The only downside is watching video on stone is really slow, it's like the frames move at a stone's pace...

i truly laughed out loud at that. lol

my first computer was a TRS-80 (tape media no hard drive), second was a Tandy 1000 (5.25 disk, 40 MB hdd), and third was an 8088 (don't ask why we went to something older! i don't know), then a Packard Bell P-75 with 1 GB hard drive and 16 MB of ram.

 

[looseliam]

Anyone remember 8" floppies??

 

[looseliam]

Oh, it's Viagra, not V1a8ra. Now I got it. =]

I'll do some digging in the weeks to follow. I think I my still have Windows 1 on floppy.

I know I have 2 somewhere. I should try and load it on some ancient box. I doubt the media is still good, though.