The first computer I ever used didn’t have a hard drive (Macintosh 128k). The first hand me down computer I had in my room was a 286 with a 500mb HDD.
I vaguely remember that one evening my father drilled into me that if I get a dialogue box with the text [Disk Read Error, (Abort) (Retry) (Initialize)?] That Initialize was never the correct option. Apparently I deleted one of his projects by mistake. I was 5 or 6 at the time
My buddy’s first HDD for his Amiga held 20mb. It was the size of a toaster, and cost something like $400. Now, a chip the size of my fingernail can hold a terabyte, and costs less than that HDD. I know it’s slowed down a lot, but I really wonder where we’ll be in another forty years.
My first computer was a Coleco/ADAM with a tape drive.
My first “IBM Compatible” computer was a 286 with a 40 MB hard drive. It also had a CD-ROM which at the time was this whole huge futuristic thing. We had an entire encyclopedia on a CD! They could hold hundreds of megabytes! More storage than I could ever need!
I have a camera drone with a 128 gigabyte micro SD card in it. The card is smaller than my fingernail. I freely admit that having that much storage on something so small just doesn’t add up in my brain. I know its possible, it works, I’m just someone who grew up dealing with megabytes being something that took up a lot of physical space and now something a few orders of magnitude larger could get lost in my pocket.
I remember when even having a 160gb hard drive was unthinkable.
The first computer I ever used didn’t have a hard drive (Macintosh 128k). The first hand me down computer I had in my room was a 286 with a 500mb HDD.
I vaguely remember that one evening my father drilled into me that if I get a dialogue box with the text [Disk Read Error, (Abort) (Retry) (Initialize)?] That Initialize was never the correct option. Apparently I deleted one of his projects by mistake. I was 5 or 6 at the time
I think my first harddrive was smaller than that, and we had to compress it to get double the space. However, everything ran 4x slower.
My buddy’s first HDD for his Amiga held 20mb. It was the size of a toaster, and cost something like $400. Now, a chip the size of my fingernail can hold a terabyte, and costs less than that HDD. I know it’s slowed down a lot, but I really wonder where we’ll be in another forty years.
I remember watching ZDTV/TechTV in the 90s and Leo Laporte referring to an 8GB drive as “an entire universe in there”.
My first computer was a Coleco/ADAM with a tape drive.
My first “IBM Compatible” computer was a 286 with a 40 MB hard drive. It also had a CD-ROM which at the time was this whole huge futuristic thing. We had an entire encyclopedia on a CD! They could hold hundreds of megabytes! More storage than I could ever need!
I have a camera drone with a 128 gigabyte micro SD card in it. The card is smaller than my fingernail. I freely admit that having that much storage on something so small just doesn’t add up in my brain. I know its possible, it works, I’m just someone who grew up dealing with megabytes being something that took up a lot of physical space and now something a few orders of magnitude larger could get lost in my pocket.