• Rimu@piefed.socialEnglish
    24·
    19 days ago

    My second computer had a 20 MB HDD and it was wonderful to have soooo much space compared to the previous computer which had no HDD and 3 floppy drives.

    Then a year later I added a second 20 MB HDD and was absolutely swimming in space.

    Back then a ‘large’ app was 100 KB. You’d spend all day writing code and produce a 13 KB file.

        • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          17 days ago

          the c64’s lt.kernel hard disk had a data transfer speed of 38 kilobytes per second. compare to something like the st506/mfm (the first 5.25in hdd) with specs that max out at 5 megabits per second.

          which was a significant upgrade over the 1541 floppy drive at like 400 bytes per second (up to ~ 2.5 kilobytes per second with a fastload cartridge). atari’s floppy drive was about twice as fast, apple’s were even faster. commodore at the time insisted on backwards compatibility with their earlier disk drive, which is why the 1541 was so fucking slow.

  • Jessica@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    13·
    19 days ago

    I remember my parents taking us to the Gateway store, and the guy who helped us said something along the lines of “This PC has 12 gigs; you’ll never run out of space!”

    Napster hit the scene within a few months. Started getting “low disk space!” warnings real quick.

  • Kn1ghtDigital@lemmy.zipEnglish
    13·
    19 days ago

    All the oldies flocking here to tell everyone about how cool their tiny hard drives were.

    Hi, I had a 25mb hard drive and it was awesome. Technology!

    • SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.caEnglish
      3·
      17 days ago

      All the oldies flocking here to tell everyone about how cool their tiny hard drives were.

      sigh…as a kid there was actually no storage. You would transcribe code from magazines, then the tape cassette era, they worked 80% of the time, 50% of the time.

    • affenlehrer@feddit.orgEnglish
      3·
      19 days ago

      Hi, I don’t remember the size of my first HDD, I guess about 40 MB. Was a pretty big boy, filling a whole 5.25 " slot. What I remember most about it, was that my father told me to always park it.

      • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
        3·
        19 days ago

        Parking drive heads is indeed the term for the drive moving them off the platter, which it does when cleanly powered down to protect the platter.

        searches

        Apparently, though I wasn’t aware of this until now, some DOS hard drives required manual parking by the user.

        https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11545/on-dos-computers-what-would-the-park-command-do

        Hard drives have read/write heads which fly above the spinning disks when the drive is powered. When power is removed, the heads no longer fly… For a long time now, the arms which hold the heads have been designed to “auto-park” the heads away from the disks’ surface, or over a safe “landing zone”, when they lose power¹, but early (up to the mid 80s) hard drives didn’t have this feature, so their heads would land on the disk surface, which could sometimes damage the surface.

        So early PCs had a PARK command which would park the heads away from the disk surface. Typically, this would attempt to move the heads past the last “official” cylinder (over an “engineering cylinder” on MFM and RLL drives), or, starting with ATs, use the landing zone specified in the BIOS drive parameter table (accessed using the vectors stored at interrupts 0x41 and 0x46). You can see one such implementation in Roedy Green’s PARK which comes with source code, or in Jim Leonard’s disassembly of SpinRite’s PARK.

        On PCs with auto-parking heads, it was safe to wait for the DOS command prompt, and the lights to switch off: COMMAND.COM ensures that I/O is finished before it displays the command prompt (and in-memory disk caches are supposed to honour that too).

        (In fact, this feature is what allows Roedy Green’s PARK to work too: you’d wait for the command prompt, so there’s no outstanding I/O, then run PARK, which would be loaded from disk, then run with no I/O apart from parking the heads, then either loop forever or return to the command prompt which would normally not result in any I/O either, so the heads would remain safely parked. SpinRite’s PARK waits for the user to press a key, so the user can power the computer off without pressing a key and thus ensure there’s no untoward I/O.)

        New PCs in 1994 wouldn’t need this, but it was common for schools to have very old computers, and an early PC requiring PARK wouldn’t be unheard of. Old habits die hard too, so it’s possible that the advice to run PARK was kept alive long after it stopped being relevant, but that would have involved copying the PARK command since it was system-specific and not part of DOS.

        If I remember correctly, IDE drives never needed PARK, so you’d only find it on PCs equipped with pre-IDE drives (commonly referred to as MFM or RLL drives).

        • affenlehrer@feddit.orgEnglish
          2·
          19 days ago

          I’m not sure what kind of drive it was. I remember using the park command in DOS but it’s possible it wasn’t actually necessary. I guess my father had experience with earlier drives and just assumed it was good practice. I also remember the park command caused some audible noise from the HDD. Probably some whirring and a click but I’m not sure about this.

  • manxu@piefed.socialEnglish
    11·
    19 days ago

    It’s funny to see cost per GB on the right. Back in 1980, most people didn’t even know what a Gigabyte might be.

    • billwashere@lemmy.worldEnglish
      4·
      19 days ago

      I always chuckle thinking about taking a 1TB Micro SD back in time and watching people’s heads explode.

      I remember being in college in the very early 90s and a friend got a machine with 2 2gb hard drives and wondering what he was going to do with all that space. Now I have a NAS at home with something like 100TB and it’s almost 75% full.

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      18 days ago

      Around 2000 I remember a guy at the computer store telling me that 20 gigs was a ton and how would I even use it? Well, one pirated 700 Meg movie at a time is how (most pirate copies tried to keep movies to 700 mb so they’d fit on a burned cd)

      • adarza@lemmy.caEnglish
        2·
        17 days ago

        (most pirate copies tried to keep movies to 700 mb so they’d fit on a burned cd)

        linux distributions used to do the same. now they dgaf, and some iso don’t even fit on a single layer dvd.

        hell, i just purged more than a “cd’s worth” of old kernels out of /boot here.

  • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    11·
    19 days ago

    I remember getting my first 10MB hard drive, c. the 80s. I remember holding it in my hands and marveling at how I could put ten million bytes in this little enclosure and just… carry it around, if I so chose. Not that I was inclined to; that thing was heavy.

    Eventually, after the drive failed, I took it apart and pinched the absolute fuck out of my finger between the two neodymium magnets. Blood was spilled.

    Computers used to be fun. They still are, but they used to be too.

  • Ada@piefed.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    10·
    19 days ago

    I had a 186 (or possibly an 8088?) in the mid 80s as my first PC. It ran on two low density 5.25" floppy drives, with no internal HD. My uncle bought himself a new HDD and gave me his old 20MB drive. When I was next at the local computer store, I asked how much a 20MB drive costs, and my jaw hit the floor!

  • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    9·
    18 days ago

    And every step of the way, some assholes idiots inspired society to think “we will never need more than this”