WD 5Tb My passport

[Aubrey]

Just took delivery of WD My Passport 5Tb drive. Form factor is smaller than my current 4Tb My Passport. It would easily fit in shirt pocket.
88 Euro, 96.29 incl. shipping, I couldn't pass it at that price (Great deal from amazon.de in March - finally just delivered today by courier)
Plenty of space when we finally get moving again.

I remember working in Venezuela in 2001 and the first 1Tb disk was delivered to the company I was consulting with.
I went with the IT manager to the computer room to look at this magnificent disk in it's own BIG box. I was awed!

I wonder what the next 20 years will bring? Hopefully still be around to see!

Aubrey.

[Mario]

I'm sure we all will be happy to see you marvel at a 20 Exabyte USB 9.0 stick with access times measures in Nanoseconds 20 years from now.
Why drop dead when there is so much interesting stuff coming up all the time 

I recall, in one of my earlier incarnations, seeing a 1GB (!) hard disk with the size of a larger shoe box making the noise of a vacuum cleaner.
And in an even earlier incarnation of myself, I recall seeing 10 MB (!) hard disk with the form factor of a standard household fridge...
Checkout the fabulous "Hidden Figures" movie to get an impression.

... that said, a 80 MP studio still image camera now outputs several hundred megabytes per image.
And let's don't talk about the storage requirements of standard state-of-the-line 8K video cameras with 48 frames/second...

[Aubrey]

Why drop dead when there is so much interesting stuff coming up all the time 

I recall, in one myself, I recall seeing 10 MB (!) hard disk the with the form factor of a standard household fridge...

I know, trying not to drop dead!
I wonder what was the disk size on the ibm 360 I used in university and programmed with PLC, a sub set of PL1.

I still have an image of that 1gb disk somewhere ill see if I can find it tomorrow. Looks like a wankel engine for its size

How many remember when we happily worked on one of the first PCs, an IBM XT WITH A 10mb hard disk....and then the AT came out with a 20mb hard disk.... Of course we could store data on a 5 1/2" floppy disk. It really was floppy!  I remember running flight simulator on the XT!

[jch2103]

I wonder what was the disk size on the ibm 360 I used in university and programmed with PLC, a sub set of PL1.

Ah, yes, PL1 - When I took a course on it (and used the IBM 360), it was called the Language of the Future!

[Tveloso]

How many remember when we happily worked on one of the first PCs, an IBM XT WITH A 10mb hard disk....and then the AT came out with a 20mb hard disk.... Of course we could store data on a 5 1/2" floppy disk. It really was floppy!  I remember running flight simulator on the XT!

I remember around this time, being told that there would be a 100mb hard disk coming out soon...and not believing it!

[Aubrey]

I found the image of the 1 Gig disk; alongside it is a 1 GB SD card. A bit ironic given that one can now purchase a 256 Gb SD card for under 70$


Aubrey.

[Mario]

Niiice!

I also have something similar in my collection.
This is the smallest 1 GB disk (made by IBM) I have ever used:

[Jingo]

Near images... I watched a Youtube video recently where they programmed punch cards and launched up a very old system to computer something simplistic.... punch cards were slightly before my time but oh so very cool.

[Aubrey]

My first year computer course as part of engineering degree had us programming a Borroughs computer.
We used machine language with punched cards for the first 2 terms.
We programmed solving a 2 variable simultaneous equation. (I suppose with integer solutions, I don't remember)
The following term we went to assembler

The next year we went to PLC, as I said earlier a subset of PL1.
The class of the following year used Pascal - the best language for the future (?)

Aubrey.

[lbo]

Guys, your postings make me feel younger.

I just missed the punch card era at my university and was allowed to program in Fortran on a time-sharing computer with 128KB RAM.

My first computer used for real work had a whopping 10MB hard disk:

[JohnZeman]

As long as we're taking a trip down Memory Lane, here's a photo of my first computer, a Commodore 64.

Back in the early 1980s I wasn't planning on buying a computer but when I saw one on sale in a local store I bought it on impulse because I'd been hearing computers would be the wave of the future.

Brought it home and was sorely disappointed when I booted it up only to see a blank screen with a blinking prompt.  I don't know what I was expecting it to do but I certainly wasn't expecting that.

Long story short I bought every book I could find on programming a Commodore 64 computer and a few months later I had written my first program, a bowling game which you can see in the attached photo.

I remember the most challenging part of creating that game was figuring out how to make it automatically keep the score.

[Mario]

Ah, the C64. Such a nice machine at the time. Awesome stuff was created for that little processor and so many fun games.
The Internet Archive has 9,000 C64 games playable, in your web browser: https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_c64_games

[Jingo]

I still own my original C64 - also the first computer I owned - a present from my grandparents!  One memory from those days is typing in a 5 page program from one of those C64 magazines you could buy... with checksums on each line so you knew you typed it in correctly.  Happily playing along after spending a long time typing it in when someone pulled the plug from the wall to vacuum!... no cassette backup yet so poof.... all gone!  I was one unhappy 12 year old....   

[ubacher]

Since we seem to be going down memory lane: here two photos of my first encounter with computers.
A "core memory" and "tuning" such a memory using an oscilloscope. No integrated circuits then.
(My own photos).

[Aubrey]

A "core memory" and "tuning" such a memory using an oscilloscope. No integrated circuits then.

Wow, I didn't know that core memory had to be tuned.
I think I see 75 bits of memory, 9 bytes!

My memory (excuse the pun) of core memory is in the oilfield acquiring information about recently drilled wells; engineers used to work on a machine with 16K (maybe only 8K?) of core memory in a "big box" under the keyboard with a pdp11 computer. Programs were read from a magnetic tape, and data written onto a second tape.

When I started working with the pdp11 we had advanced to 128K memory, this was on integrated circuits and fitted inside the pdp11 - we used the "box" for storing manuals.

Aubrey.

[Mees Dekker]

My first experience with computers was with a PDP8 and paper tapes (which was already a big step forward from punch cards). The program could be punched to a paper tape, that could be loaded the next time.

I took a course in programming in 1974-1975. At that time the NASA moonlanding program was "hot" and the final exam of the course was to calculate the optimum height to start the moonlander motor and with what thrust to land safely on the moon, while having enough fuel left for take off. Absolutely exilarating to see that happen in real life a couple of years later.

I got my first personal computer in 1982, before even MS-DOS or PC-DOS were on the market. Floppy disks had to be mounted/dismounted in order to be accessible. Printer was a daisy wheel printer. Costs at that time: approx € 7000. When you add inflation over 40 years it would be around double this amount.

Think of how far have we come in better performance and lower costs.