OK, wreckers. It's 'fess up time!

[Never Enough Money]

I was replying to Gino. Sorry for the confusion.

[Dave Hinz]

160 or 185K, depending on if it was 35 or 40 tracks.

Dave Hinz

[Silvan]

I was thinking 160K. Hrm.

[Gino]

I still have my 1980 vintage notch cutter for turning single sided floppies into double sided. I also have a box of 5 8" floppies with the original price still on the box. $99.95.

[Jim Warman]

144Kb though Micro$oft had a way of packing a bit more onto them when they shipped Winders Fer WerkGroops....

HOWEVER.... I can still vaguely recall single side, low density that couldn't hold what is now a smallish *,gif....

While we're at it... how many can remember when a 44Meg HDD was HUGE!!!

[rcook5]

For most computers, yes. However Commodores were always a little -- shall we say -- idiosyncratic?

--RC

"Sometimes history doesn't repeat itself. It just yells 'can't you remember anything I've told you?' and lets fly with a club. -- John W. Cambell Jr.

[Gino]

I have a luggable with a 10 meg HD. The purchase price of the computer new was about 20 grand. I weighs about 38 pounds and the last time I plugged it in 5 years ago it still worked. Now I'm having the urge to haul it out of the shed and plug it in.:)

[Morris Dovey]

My first hard drive (attached to an IMSAI 8080) was an IBM 2311 with only 7MB. The second was a 10MB drive in a Morrow MD-11.

[Morris Dovey]

I'll see your notcher and 8" FDs and raise you a paper tape splicer with a box of mylar splices. (-:

[mark]

I just threw out a pair of ST-225s. Sick.

[Silvan]

I think the huge drive Dad used to have at work was only 32 MB or so. It was the size of a dormitory refrigerator.

[j.duprie]

I can remember back in the day when dad was working for the feds at Apollo (the moon shot days) when a huge washing machine sized disk "array" held the contents of a small box of punch cards. One of the fun geek things to do was to send it read/write commands timed such that it would walk accross the floor.....

I can remember the platters getting pulled out (they were changeable). They were big, and made an amazing ringing sound when pinged with a pencil (on the edge of course....)

--JD

[Dave Hinz]

I've never seen "5MB" spelled that way before. And it _was_ huge, grep "Hawk removable platter". Big blue thing, maybe 16" in diameter, around 2" thick, big white handle on the top to lift it out of the drive. I think my drive had 5MB fixed, 5MB removable. Size of a small washing machine.

Fun times...

[Dave Hinz]

Damn newbies...

[Dave Hinz]

I sold a _bunch_ of 8" floppies in the time leading up to Y2K. Had a stack of 'em, with the "too good to toss, not good enough to use" stuff. As Y2K came near, people with ancient systems needed to patch 'em. My employer at the time was one of those. As an employee, I wasn't allowed to sell to my employer (huge megacorp with stupid rules), so we bought from the local media supplier. But, I wasn't prohibited from selling _to_ the local media supplier, so...

I think I got something like 5 bucks a piece for aged, used, 8" floppies. About half of what they were worth when new, but a whole lot more than they're worth for any other reason. Purely a supply:demand situation.

[jo4hn]

/clever rejoinder mode/ Oh Yeah??!! /crm off/ My first disk had 2K 24 bit words. It was also the RAM. Cycle time of 0.01 sec. Verdan computer, manufacture by Autonetics and the flight computer for the Hound Dog cruise missile. Gronk. hail to the geezers, jo4hn

[Dave Hall]

Hmmmm, I am reminded of a little TI unit I had with a membrane "keyboard" whose "harddrive" was my cassette tape recorder. I am not a techie (I was in school getting my accounting degree at the time), but I managed to program a Tic-Tac-Toe game in Basic on it. 16K of total memory if I recall. The "monitor" was my TV set.

Dave Hall

[Dave Hinz]

I think you win.

[John T]

I'm not as "ancient" as some, but my first computer was a sinclair Z-81 with 2k or 3k of memory, 1980. Cost an amazingly low $200 then. I later moved up to a Timex-sinclair T-1000 with 16K of memory, using my tape recorder as a storage device. Moved up again to an Atari 400 with their tape drive and 16K memory, got a MPP (now USR) 300 baud modem, then a

1200 baud modem for "only" $175. I remember picking up 10DSDD 5.25" floppies for the incredible low price of 19.95, and I didn't even have a floppy drive yet then. an Atari 800, a few Atari ST's, including the areas first 20mb HD made for it ($600 IIRC). Back then, slide show programs were intended to read off floppies and show them as fast as they could load. When I tried it on the HD, it flashed through the images about every 2 seconds. :)

I finally "upgraded" to a PC when my last ST died.

John

[Michael Burton]

Jim Warman wrote in news:iYLCd.55408$KO5.15149@clgrps13:

Oh Man, I remember the 44Meg HDD being huge. I also think of actually paying $200 for a 4mb RAM chip for a 486 and thinking wow, I'll bet a 50mb of RAM would make an awesome machine except it would cost 12 Grand!! Hah!