General > General Technical Chat

Hard Disk Storage 1985

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bd139:
I am ashamed to say that I don't even own a CD drive or CDs or CD player any more. I got a book with a CD a while back and a friendly forum member with the same one uploaded the CD to dropbox so I could download it.

I'm old enough for 8 inch floppies, cassettes as storage and not quite old enough to have to toggle the boot loader in, thank goodness :)

Agree with grey beard icon

ferdieCX:
I learned programming in an IBM 360/44 with punched cards
My first job was repairing Olivetti Audit 6 boards.
They used 8 inch floppies, but the system loader was in a 256 bytes magnetic card.

GeorgeOfTheJungle:
Teletypes and punched tapes :-+ After the CDs and CD-Rs came what, magneto-optical drives? Those were pretty unreliable!

james_s:
We also got our first CD-ROM drive around 1993-94 as part of one of those Sound Blaster kits. It cost around $500 at the time which was a lot of money, but that was much cheaper than they had been a few years earlier. They existed in the 80s but they were far too expensive for the average consumer. It wasn't until the late 90s that a lot of software started using CDs as installation media. Previously most CD-ROM software ran primarily off the CD itself. Hard drives were far too small so CD-ROM was used for things like encyclopedias and interactive multimedia software that was too large to install on the hard drive. In 1994 40-120 MB (not GB!) hard drives were typical so the 630 MB stored on a CD-ROM was substantial.

Gyro:

--- Quote from: GeorgeOfTheJungle on July 03, 2018, 04:36:08 pm ---Teletypes and punched tapes :-+ After the CDs and CD-Rs came what, magneto-optical drives? Those were pretty unreliable!

--- End quote ---

Punched tape was the best!  Human readable, hand editable and repairable. You could see when it was getting in danger of data corruption and create a verifiable backup. Also great fun to spool up again (assuming you hadn't trodden on it in the meantime!).

It brings back many happy memories. :)


P.S. Funny to think now that I was using MFM HDDs, removable 14" disk packs, Mag tapes and Floppies in 1985, all concurrent technology.

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