Re: [Nolug] Hard disks

On Friday 31 October 2003 02:17 am, Ron Johnson wrote:
> Ok,
>
> Who here remembers when hard disks were measured in dollars per
> megabyte? How about hundreds of dollars per megabyte? Joey and I
> are old enough. Scott? Who else?
>
> Machines are so fast today, and yet, in the early 80s, IBM was able
> to build a system with 1.9 MIPS & 6MB RAM that delivered sub-second
> response time to 70 on-line users.

My dad was a programmer from the 60's through the 90's. When
he decided to be a consultant, he bought a HP 1000 XL, which
was our first home computer. I was a junior in high school at
the time, so the first programming language I learned was FORTRAN.
I also learned to do the sysgens, which back then if you wanted
to do the modern equivalent of fdisk, you had to put the disk info
into the sysgen answer file and recompile the OS. The system
orignally came with two 5 1/4 floppys, but he later bought a 5 meg
hard drive for $4500. At the time, we didn't think we'ed ever
fill it up. It seems pretty funny now. That was $1.11 per kilobyte.
Later he upgraded it to an A series, which was nice because
RTE-A had dynamic memory allocation, whereas in RTE-XL
you had to manually page the memory into blocks, based on the
compiled sizes of the programs.

Andy Johnson

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Received on 10/31/03