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| Hard Disk Storage 1985 |
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| james_s:
1985 sounds about right, the IBM XT had been on the market for a couple years by then and clone manufactures were popping up like dandelions. Hard drives were still expensive, but 10-20MB drives had come down in price to the point where a good number of computer users could afford the convenience of having one. It wasn't until the mid 2000's though that capacities really started to overtake demand. These days it's pretty much only serious photographers and media hoarders who need more than the smallest commodity drives on the market. Used to be a top of the line drive was filled to the brim within a year or two. |
| joeqsmith:
I knew a gentleman that worked on a drum drive. The was quite a large system. He told a story about how it came apart one time. The first hard drive I used with the PC was a Corvus. At the time I had a drive made by Data General that had a removable 14" pack and a fixed drive on one spindle. This was used on a Nova 3. We also had a hard drive from Hewlett Packard that used HPIB. The was physically very large and had the platters mounted vertically. This picture show with one of my early turbo AT clones. The disk drives are to the right and are larger than the AT. Tape drive is just above them on the far right. That's my Summa Graphics optical mouse. None of that ball crap. I still have a Seagate 5.25" 20M ST225 in operation inside my oldest DSO. |
| rsjsouza:
--- Quote from: Whales on July 03, 2018, 06:10:16 am ---From various old computer magazines I have read: early CD drives were very expensive, even 1x ones, let alone 2x and 3x. Anecdotal story about early CD burners: having no buffer or ability to handle physical disruption. The former meant your computer could not be used whilst burning. The latter meant bumping the table ruined a whole burn. All at low burn speeds :D --- End quote --- I still remember having access to the IT department of my university and they had a Kodak PCD 225 Writer that could write at 2x and interfaced via SCSI-1 with its exclusive PC host running Windows 3.11 and Corel CD Creator 1 (the later version 2.0 was much more reliable). Whenever we were burning a CD (US$20.00 a pop), the table was not to be touched and the computer was not to be fiddled with. Still, we lost 25% of the CDs recorded then. Another area that was quite sensitive was extracting audio from an audio CD - any keypress on the host PC and the resulting .wav file was full of pops and clicks. One year earlier we had bought our first CD ROM drive (a Toshiba 4x caddy CD drive with SCSI-1 interface - similar to this one) that was incredibly reliable and could read terribly scratched CDs. For a brief time I connected it to a Sound Blaster card that had a SCSI-1 interface. |
| CJay:
--- Quote from: bd139 on July 04, 2018, 08:07:15 am ---I had a circular saw that looked less scary than that :-DD --- End quote --- Emergency retract on those things could leave fingerprints (and fingers) on the platters. My first CD-ROM reader was a 2x SCSI with caddy and in an external case, it was 'bought' for the bargain price of a dozen capacitors that needed replacing in the PSU, it had been tossed as unrepairable by a client who'd paid the wrong side of £400 for it. I've had HDDs back to 20MB MFM and repaired older 5MB Rodimes, replacing individual heads and platters in them :) |
| james_s:
I remember how exciting it was when my friend got a 2x CD burner, I think it cost him $500 at the time. The blank discs were $10 each and the slightest glitch would cause it to make a coaster. I'm not sure why they didn't have some sort of buffer, RAM was expensive but not *that* expensive. I guess the drives were already do expensive without it. |
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