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Now I remember an Olivetti with a 5mb hard drive on which we built a video rental system, later to be upgraded to 20mb when development was complete.
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity
RAH
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Yup. the first one I remember was the big foot drive.
It didn't fit in a 5.25 drive bay so it was mounted on top on clone power supplies.
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Of course, you were lucky.
I've still got an NT4 workstation sitting on a shelf which has much less of everything than my phone. They both work, but one is so old it's a joke and is utterly useless unless you want to cruise through a VS 1997 build.
Incidentally, it has VB5. Almost the same as VB6, which still sells for hundreds. 
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I saw for the very first time a PC booting from an hard disk at University. I thought it was a miracle.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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My first job was using a hybrid computer. The main part was a EAI 680 analogue computer with 3 foot square detachable patch panels. An EAI 640 digital computer was used to control this. It ran via cassette operating system (COS) and the cassettes were very similar to 8 track audio tapes. This latter was replaced soon after I joined by an EAI Pacer which used 5Kb disks the size of vinyl LPs although it still had to be bootstrapped via the “octal” switches on the front. For simulation work analogue ruled in those days.
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Fascinating.
Veni, vidi, vici.
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top tip: use sequoia view [^] to find out where the bloat is. Takes a while, but it's worth it.
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The first hard drive I purchased on my own was a 340MB Western Digital drive, for which I paid over $600. It was happily installed in a 386SX, 16 MHz machine with a whopping 1MB of RAM.
I've got data structures bigger than that now.
Software Zen: delete this;
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20 MB, that big! My first HD was 5 MB. Which was great for a CP/M-machine.
At that time, a hard disk had just two states:
Either it was new, or it was full. Sad, but true.
Alcohol. The cause of, and the solution to, all of life's problems - Homer Simpson
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Engineer 1 : I remember when all we had was a big time-sharing machine with only text-based terminals as an interface.
Engineer 2 : Text-based terminals?!? You had text-based terminals? I remember when our only interface was punch cards.
Engineer 1 : Punch cards?!? You had punch cards? I remember when all we had was paper tape.
Engineer 2 : Paper tape?!? You had paper tape? I remember when we hand to hand assemble code with toggle switches on the front panel of the machine.
Engineer 1 : Toggle switches?!? You had toggle switches? I remember when we had to wire-wrap all of the 0's and 1's?
Engineer 2 : 1's?!? You had 1's?...
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... one of the first computers I used was PDP-11 with twin 5Mb drives. To boot it you had to manually load the bootstrap program, about a dozen instructions, using the front panel toggle switches.
Not sure how much memory that had (probably 64k bytes = 32k words) but the very first computer I programmed was a PDP-8 with 4096 12-bit words of memory (i.e. 6kb). It supported 5 simultaneous users on teletypes but had no disk storage at all!
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Gus Gustafson
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600MB drives that took three of us to lift. We hauled them up three flights of stairs; had to do this often, as they would fail because the air conditioning couldn't keep the things cool enough. (vax/vms system)
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I remember the "Start" button was a physical button on the card and paper tape reader!
I remember, the "Program Manager" in Window 3.x will never take the place of the DOS prompt
I remember, the "Start" button will never take the place of Program Manager
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I remember when my dad got his first computer - an Altair 8800b with 32K of RAM with a Lear-Siegler ADM-3a dumb terminal.
"Those were the days, my friend . . ."
"Olorin I was in the West that is forgotten . . ." - JRR Tolkien
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Having 4K of RAM on my first computer (home built S100 bus Z80 system). All I had was a 2K monitor program (Zapple) that would allow me to dump memory, peak/poke memory, read/write at I/O ports, etc.
I learned to program the Z80 by the numbers since Zapple had no programming languages. I eventually wirewrapped a FSK board to be able to save programs to cassette tape. Since I had a reel-to-reel recorder I was able to up the speed from 1200 baud an amazing 9600 baud!! Fun times in the 70s.
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ssadler wrote: I was able to up the speed from 1200 baud an amazing 9600 baud!! Fun times in the 70s.
That's really cool. Yeah, the 70's and 80's were definitely the "hobbyist era". Maybe things like the Raspberry Pi bring those days back to some extent.
Marc
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Yeah, the Pi isn't doing it at the low level OS/assembler level, but it certainly brings the 'just playing around' on the software level into the reaches of interested children and people who don't want to drop £500 on their hobby.
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I think we all get used to what we first know. I'm of a similar vintage to you in this regard in that I started out with tens of megabytes (I remember the 'big' second hard drive my dad bought for our main home PC at the time ... a massive 200MB!) and find it hard to believe just how big things are today. Never mind hard drives, I can carry 8GB in my pocket.
Data transfer rates are amazing too. A gigabit network is a magical thing. I downloaded the (rather good) Planetside 2 over my home wireless network ... 8 gig or something like that in a matter of minutes.
Anyone else remember in the mid 90s some time there was a film where the main plot device was that they loaded some guy's brain with a vast amount of super secret data so he could get that data to his paymasters? They loaded him up over the recommended capacity of the device and it leaked into his personality. (It wasn't a great film and I saw it on TV.) I think the vast amount of data was 3GB or something, clearly chosen to be way too big to imagine small chips being able to hold it at the time. Nowadays you could just smuggle a MicroSD card by swallowing it or something.
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I don't remember when computers were just dumb terminals and they have to be connected to a powerful server somewhere else to do something useful, but retro is in, so I may still have a chance to experience this. 
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RafagaX wrote: I don't remember when computers were just dumb terminals and they have to be connected to a powerful server somewhere else to do something useful,
You must not use Windows 8. 
Marc
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My first hard drive was two 5 and 1/4's
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Marc Clifton wrote: when 1 GB was a phenomenally huge amount of disk space
I remember the first hard disk I ever saw on a personal computer.. it was a stunning 5MB. It was larger than the computer it was connected to. It was an staggering amount of space when significant programs could be measured in 10s of K. Visiting the friends who had it was also the first all-nigher I ever did.
Marc Clifton wrote: Windows gives me a red "running low on disk space bar" and I still have 3GB left
I also remember when NT could install to my 150MB Wren 3, and still have significant space for user data left over. Ahh.. now that was a disk drive. Turning it on made a sound like a small jet engine starting up. I used to joke about having the only jet-powered PC  .
We can program with only 1's, but if all you've got are zeros, you've got nothing.
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5 MB TRS-80 Hard Drive. nuf said. Now I have a pair of 1 TB SSDs in my laptop... I haven't got that red message though.
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I think the first PC I owned was 1GB. (It was huge) The first company PC the whole office shared was 2 floppy drives and a 10MB drive. I had to support two different OSs, so I partitioned the drive into 2 and 8 MB and used the floppy to switch the primary partition or just booted from floppy. I'm not sure but I think this was the biggest HD available at the time. (I was one of two "techies" in the office and I was appointed head keeper of the monster.)
I hated it so much, I used my own money to build a custom computer desk when such a thing couldn't be bought. Who knows, the sales reps were so impressed, they invited clients to see software (their job) and they just "had" to come over and see what I built. So I might have invented the computer desk, because it was on the market a few months after I built it. (Idiot. I hated the PC so much, didn't even think of copywriting something that made it more bearable.)
My laptop I'm writing on is sitting on (where else?) my lap. OK, Sometimes I pull out a foldable desk (TV tray??), but usually it is more trouble than it is worth.
Also, the 16 bit PC was a joke. I'd supported and used 60 bit mainframes (real computers) for 20 years. I looked down on the IBM mainframes because they were 32 bit devices and I supported the scientific world where accuracy was supreme. (CDC supported double, but its real was 2 digits more accurate than IBM's double. Integer had 18 vs. 9 place accuracy.) The last few years I'd also supported the Cray. (64 bit, integer was only 1 digit more accurate, real was the same accuracy - more accurate than today's double. MUCH faster, maybe could keep up with today's PC.)
Today's PC is 64 bit, but you have to use long to get 18 place accuracy.
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