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I am waiting for a computer I ordered a few days ago from Dell. The size of the hard drive will be 500 GB, although I could have gone for a 1 TB drive if I really had wanted to. I ultimately decided that by the time I need more space in a few years drives will have gotten cheaper and I can buy one then.Anyway, this got me thinking. When I first went to college in the early- to mid-1990s, my father gave me his old computer to take with me and it had hard drive space of 40 megabytes. Two years later, I got another computer (a Gateway) and it had a 750 mb drive. In 2001 I got a Dell laptop, which I believe had 2 GB worth of space, and when that went kaplooey two years later I bought Dell, but a desktop, which must have had around 30 GB. That computer also broke down and in 2005 I bought the computer I'm using now, which has 70 GB. So now I'll be going up to 500 GB. How long before that runs out?I have had only about 2% free disk space on my computer for some time. I have deleted things, but that only works for so long. I realize that you're better off having 10-15% free space, but oh well. Anyway, it's interest to see the changes in storage over the years.
My first computer was a Tandy by Radioshack. It had two, that's right two, 5-1/4 floppy drives and that was a big deal. I think the RAM was like 32.That was about 20 years ago. I was 8 at the time. 8)
My first computer was a Tandy by Radioshack. It had two, that's right two, 5-1/4 floppy drives and that was a big deal. I think the RAM was like 32.That was about 20 years ago. I was 8 at the time. 8)
Ooooh I see what you did there. 🙂
My first was a Toshiba laptop, 10MB, 15 pounds for close to $5,000 I bought in 1987. And I do not miss the dot matrix printers, slow, separating edges and pages.
My first was a Toshiba laptop, 10MB, 15 pounds for close to $5,000 I bought in 1987. And I do not miss the dot matrix printers, slow, separating edges and pages.
It's amazing to think that if a person were to invest that kind of money into a car instead, he could retain much of its value four years later on. Investing in the stock market could mean quite a bit more money 10-20 years later. Computers, on the other hand, lose value very rapidly. I realize it's the nature of the beast, but it's a shame. I am fortunate that my current computer has lasted me five years (I think I paid in the neighborhood of $500 dollars for it). Still, it comes out to $8-$9 per month so far. I have had a few computers in the past which have stopped working after two years, which equates to an expensive loss.
We were talking about this in the office yesterday. My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20 with something like 8 bits of RAM and a cassette tape drive. I remember thinking how cool it was to write simple BASIC programs on it. I could play with it for hours.
I remember the first computer my dad got for our family was an Apple IIe, which didn't even have a hard drive. It was special in that it had two 5.25″ floppy disk drives, which were in a separate, large unit that was placed on top of the CPU. Around that time, I remember hearing someone else talk about IBMs which had these things called “hard drives”, which I thought was cool. And yes, of course as donroc mentioned, the dot matrix printers where you'd have to tear off the perforated borders. But be careful not to tear too quickly or carelessly, lest your pages get ripped in the process! ;D
When I was in high school, I took a computer programming course “Programming in Basic BASIC”. Yes, our projects were done on both punch cards and rolled up paper tapes (basic probability programs). Our terminals connected to the mainframe at the University of Virginia via an 8k modem. Truly high speed stuff.
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