Good Deal

[Evan F]

western digital 250gb external hdd (WHILE SUPPLIES LAST)

638674

$199.98 - $70 instant - $40 mail-in = $89.98



Picked one up at Staples Today.

 

[LaRue Medlin]

Just bought one. It is faster than my internal hd's. Great deal. I paid $154.98 - $25.00 instant in store rebate - $40.00 mail in = $89.98 + tax 7.90 = 97.88

 

[Rich Stern]

In 1986, in my first job, I was installing 10MB hard drives in IBM PCs. They cost nearly $1000 each. About $100 per megabyte.



At the time, we thought they were incredible because they were half the size of a shoebox; the previous generation 5MB drives were nearly the size of a washing machine.



For the Western Digital drive Evan shows above, the price per megabyte is about .03 cents (not 3 cents, but 3/100ths of a cent) per megabyte.

 

[Richard Kolb]

We've come a long way.



In high school we installed a 360 meg drive in my parents 386, my programming teacher told me we were nuts, we'd never need that much space.

 

[Fer Echegaray]

duplicate.

 

[Fer Echegaray]

In 91, we used to run a Personal Iris workstation with 600Mb of hard disk, and we thought we'd never fill that thing up... And a blazing fast 33MHz CPU!

 

[Bill V]

R1ch999999, you were lucky to have that in high school. I didn't see a computer with a hard drive until college--I always needed to have the boot disk (5-1/4", of course) to start up the school's Apple IIs.



And to think that compared with some of the old farts on this site, I'm not even that old!

 

[Kevin Palmer]

That is a nice little drive. I have recently enrolled in collage. I want to do a remote back up of my work as I go. That would do a very nice job of it....

 

[Richard L]

I worked USAMSA in the Pentagon back in 1977 and our computer room had 86 Itel disk drives that took up enough space that you could put in a basketball court. Each disk pack was removable and had 16 platters about 18" in diameter and only held 28 MB.



It's amazing now that all 86 disk drives could fit on that little portable hard drive and have room for hundreds and hundreds of more disk drives.



We had a 1 MB memory unit that was the size of a large refrigerator, and now you put gigabytes of memory in your shirt pocket.



...Rich

 

[Gavin Allan]

In college in '83, I had a part-time job at an insurance co that had a Xerox computer and Diablo daisy-wheel printer. I used it (CPM Wordstar) to do my papers for school and my Profs were all real impressed with the appearance. The computer had two 8" floppies and no hard drive. Seems the guys I worked for paid around $10k for the setup.

 

[Bill V]

Gavin, you may have to explain to the young pups around here what a "daisy wheel" printer is.

 

[Dreman]

RichardL has me beat. I was going to tell about my time working on 80 MByte Hard drives the size of a two-drawer filing cabinet, and how we used to be able to take them apart and fix things on them instead of just throwing them away and getting a new one. I used to have some crashed 14" dia. platters, but lost them somewhere.



And a daisy wheel printer is like a typewriter, but all of the letters are on a little arm. All of the arms were connected to the edge of a little disk, and they looked like the petals of a daisy (sort of). The printer would spin the disk to the right letter, and then a little pin would whack it against the page through an ink ribbon. Then it would move to the next, and so on. To change fonts, you had to change the disk.

 

[Jeffrey Travis]

Luckily my college got away from punch cards just in time for me to take Pascal in 1985. I took it in high school on an Apple IIe and had to have the double disk drive to run it. The final project was too large to even do on the computer so we had to just write it out on paper. I thought that was kind of crazy - tough to debug. Teacher was a jackass.



If you know how windy it is in Oswego, NY (it is right on Lake Ontario) you can understand why you would not want to be walking around with a stack of cards when the order they are in is 'kinda' important. Rubber band sales were probably brisk, at least to the programmers.



JT#14

 

[Keith McElroy]

And to think I was so happy when I got a tape drive for my Commodore VIC 20 so I could back up on audio tape. Crap, I think I have been working with computers too long...