Meme Thread... no politics

Duke said:

About 30 years ago, I was in charge of a Head Mounted Display program and we needed a vendor to assemble cables for us. This was in San Jose, CA so there were many to choose from at the time. The first one I went to (they were ultimately chosen) gave me a tour of the facility and at one point our tour guide brought us to a cabinet about the size of a large residential refrigerator with lotsa racks and cabling inside. It was an impressive sight! With some pride he told us, "This is going to be a ONE Terabyte storage array!" I think of that everytime I see a 1tb storage anything, now.

Required Meme:

In reply to rdcyclist :

I may still have sitting around somewhere an old PCMag kinda magazine (think mid-90s) where they explained what a terabyte was and how only phone companies needed them. Crazy. 

In reply to P3PPY :

Yeah, this was around '96 or so...

P3PPY said:

In reply to rdcyclist :

I may still have sitting around somewhere an old PCMag kinda magazine (think mid-90s) where they explained what a terabyte was and how only phone companies needed them. Crazy. 

When you could buy a 1000 Megabyte full height SCSI hard drive for $2000.  And that was the biggest one on the list.

In reply to NickD :

Good idea, but a few slices of bologna hung on a fence works better.  Who knew they're Carnivores?

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

P3PPY said:

In reply to rdcyclist :

I may still have sitting around somewhere an old PCMag kinda magazine (think mid-90s) where they explained what a terabyte was and how only phone companies needed them. Crazy. 

When you could buy a 1000 Megabyte full height SCSI hard drive for $2000.  And that was the biggest one on the list.

Duuude.  I paid $1100 for a 100 mb hard drive in 1987.  And it was cutting-edge large and took some finesse to work reliably.

In reply to Duke :

My first computer (not counting the Sinclair that was $99 if you bought a bed in 1983, and I'm not making that up) was a Tandy 1000TX in 1989 or 1990.  It was a 286 that didn't quite follow IBM form factors because Tandy.  It was $1000 plus $300 for an EGA monitor (which was semi compatible with Tandy graphics which were like high resolution CGA) and a $100 floppy drive.  Later we got a 2400 baud modem for ??? and I think the 32mb hard card (hard drive on an 8 bit ISA card) was $100 or $200.  I know we had the modem by 1990 because that's when I started using BBSs and the like.  And the Cleveland Freenet, a dial up system that CWRU had set up, that was kind of EMACS based for its menus, and had a walled garden forum setup based on USENET protocols, but we also had ability to send and receive e-mail from the internet at large.  They had read only USENET access at first but send access was also granted a little later.  So I got my first Internet e-mail address at age 12, technically I'm a 47 year old millenial.

In 1992 or thereabouts, my mom bought a 486SX/25 for $1000.  It came with, I recall, a 105mb hard drive and we thought that was huge.  It came with DOS 5.0 and Win3.1 but the video card only had drivers for Win3.0.  

PC/Computing had an article about Windows 3.1 including a comprehensive file list, so I was able to generate a way to run 3.1 with the video driver files for 3.0.  Not sure why they couldn't have done that themselves.  But that's always how it was, flipping DIP switches to put different peripherals on non conflicting IRQ ports, loading device drivers in the right order so as to best use the memory between 640k and 1mb (the 486, I recall, had 4mb, the 286 came maxed out at 640k)

 - Pete, the kid that resided at aj923@cleveland.Freenet.edu

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

My dad used to love telling the story about his job at an outfit called Informatics back in the 70's. They handled stuff like payroll and accounting for Stanford, Lockheed, a couple movie theater chains, Socal Edison and several other big bizzes. The mainframe that he worked on that did all that stuff had the lordly sum of 32kb of RAM....

In reply to Jay_W :

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

My dad worked with mapping software and traveled a lot so he had a home setup for his "laptops" ever since the mid 80s, including a portable where you either chose a built-in printer or expanded memory module.

My insane brother would occasionally disassemble Dad's computer hardware overnight so he could figure it out. But in 1995 Dad got a Toshiba Tecra with a 32mb ram and an incredible 1gb hard drive. The cost in 90s money was like $7k. 
You'd be hard pressed to spend that kind of $$$ on a notebook nowadays without even adjusting for inflation. 

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