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How did you ever survive 1 GB - 10 GB of storage?

Blackberryroid

Blackberryroid

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Aug 8, 2012
588
0
/private/var/vm/
Let's go back to 1995 - 2003. When 5 GB is insanely huge and everyone was fine with 1 GB.

Fast forward to 2012. When every MacBook Air user complains about the 64GB storage on the low end version.

But back in the days, how did you store your stuff in there? Your photos? Your music? Videos? Documents? Keynote Presentations?

And how did a floppy disk become enough for transferring files? I need 2 of those to fit a song.
 
Maybe cos in that time noone sane would even have thought about storing their big music collections on a puter, and movies ? The HW to just view them in acceptable quality just wasn't there for the masses.

People in that time did have big collection of CDs,DVDs and even VHS-tapes for those purposes.
 
Blackberryroid said:
Let's go back to 1995 - 2003. When 5 GB is insanely huge and everyone was fine with 1 GB.

Fast forward to 2012. When every MacBook Air user complains about the 64GB storage on the low end version.

But back in the days, how did you store your stuff in there? Your photos? Your music? Videos? Documents? Keynote Presentations?

And how did a floppy disk become enough for transferring files? I need 2 of those to fit a song.
Click to expand...

I printed my photos out, listened to music on CD's through my stereo. Videos were on my VHS and I was too young to be doing Keynotes :D
 
Blackberryroid said:
Don't you ever rip CDs? Or rip DVDs/CDs?
Click to expand...

I did later on, just not during that time perdiod you mentioned. And now all my music is digital, I havent bought a physical disc of music in years, however my current movie collection is split, I have my old DVD's on my harddrive, but a steadily growing Blu-Ray collection.
 
Photos: were still on film, got my first digital camera in 2004.

Videos: were on tape.

Music: was on CDs.

Take out those three and you're left with documents. Documents are tiny.
 
I suffered with a 50MB (yes MB not GB) hdd in a 286...We used floppy drives for most data storage, and sound? there was none...Video CD drives? Nope.

As I gradually went through the lumbering upgrades of hardware I had the first Pentium MMX processor in the UK...The first CD Rom and sound card combo from Creative...I think it was a 2X drive!

Cirrus logic were the graphics card folks back in the day (most of you won't know what I'm on about here!) and I had a 1MB card that played DOOM1 great!

Now look at what we have...To use an industry analogy, it is said that if Air travel had progressed in the sxame manner that computing has, you would now be able to fly from London to the states in under 40 minutes...Glad I was in there at the start though...All command prompt DOS stuff...It really is incredible what we can now do with our computers.
 
Blackberryroid said:
And how did a floppy disk become enough for transferring files? I need 2 of those to fit a song.
Click to expand...

They used to have enough space for an entire OS!

The first Mac my family bought was a Mac Plus with 1Mb of RAM and 20Mb SCSI HDD, thats barely enough for 4-5 songs now. The G4 PM I bought about 10 years later only had 64Mb of RAM and a 10Gb HDD, and a DVD-ROM. I put in 256Mb of RAM right away. Later I added more totaling 1.5Gb which was a lot back then. Added DVD burner later, USB2 card and new video card and LCD.

Now I have 4Gb of RAM in my G5 PM, 500Gb+1Tb internal HDD, plus 4x 2Tb external storage. Also just got a 24" LED.

The new iMac I plan to get (Ivy Bridge) will have at least 8Gb of RAM (maybe 16) and a 2Tb internal HDD, SSD if I can afford it.

How times have changed!
 
Last edited:
Lancer said:
They used to have enough space for an entire OS!

The first mac my family bought was a Mac Plus with 1Mb of RAM and 20Mb SCSI HDD, thats barely enough for 4-5 songs now. The G4 PM I bought about 10 years later only have 64Mb of RAM and a 10Gb HDD, I put in 256Mb of RAM right away. Later I added more totaling 1.5Gb which was a lot back then.

Now I have 4Gb or RAM in my G5, 500Gb+1Tb internal HDD, plus 4x 2Tb external storage. And the new iMac I plan to get will have 8Gb of RAM (maybe 16) and at least 2Tb internal HDD.

How times have changed!
Click to expand...

Yep, and way back in the day RAM was super expensive...I remember being the envy of friends when I installed 8MB (again MB not GB) in my 486DX! My current imac has 16GB of RAM and a 2GB GPU setup...A different world indeed.
 
Macman45 said:
Yep, and way back in the day RAM was super expensive...I remember being the envy of friends when I installed 8MB (again MB not GB) in my 486DX! My current imac has 16GB of RAM and a 2GB GPU setup...A different world indeed.
Click to expand...

I think we had a whole 2.5Mb of RAM in the Plus at some point.

I'm hoping when Apple updates the iMac they put in 8Gb of RAM in the 27", then I'll add 8Gb more. Just hope it's compatible as I've heard stories of some RAM not playing nice with the Apple RAM.
 
Wow. I still recall using computers that had no HDD at all. You had dual 5.25 floppy disk's and had to load programs into tiny amounts of RAM. 1GB.. heheh at the time that would have been crazy!
 
Lancer said:
I think we had a whole 2.5Mb of RAM in the Plus at some point.

I'm hoping when Apple updates the iMac they put in 8Gb of RAM in the 27", then I'll add 8Gb more. Just hope it's compatible as I've heard stories of some RAM not playing nice with the Apple RAM.
Click to expand...

I use Crucial as I refuse to pay Apple's prices for RAM...I took my imac from 8GB to 16 without any issue at all. The scanner identifies what you need and off you go. I hope you are right about the 8GB as a standard...It makes the upgrade a darn site cheaper if you don't have to remove what's in there, I ordered my imac with 8 (stock was 4) and added the other 8 as above.
 
Blackberryroid said:
Let's go back to 1995 - 2003. When 5 GB is insanely huge and everyone was fine with 1 GB.

Fast forward to 2012. When every MacBook Air user complains about the 64GB storage on the low end version.

But back in the days, how did you store your stuff in there? Your photos? Your music? Videos? Documents? Keynote Presentations?

And how did a floppy disk become enough for transferring files? I need 2 of those to fit a song.
Click to expand...

Different times, different technology, different needs

Whats the point of this thread OP?
 
My first hard drive was 40 MB. I use to have to copy save game files to floppy, remove the binaries for a game, install the one I wanted to play and get its save files from floppy.

The good ol' days. ;)

Installing Wing Commander II from the 14 floppy disks : 3 hours. Installing the expansions from floppy disk : 1 hour each. 5 hours later ? Didn't even care enough to play the game anymore.

Get that first 1 MB of RAM in there to play the original Wing Commander, great. Getting the 2nd MB of RAM to get the animated hand on the fighter's stick control, priceless (well, actually it had a price, a few hundred $$ worth of RAM... for that 1 MB).
 
At the time, that amount of storage was fine since there were no high quality movies, games or music to store. It was all a lower quality, thus, lower storage space was needed.

When Red Faction was release I remember thinking it was insane that it required two CDs. Nowadays we don't bat an eyelid to games that are 10GB+ and I almost screamed when I download RAGE on Steam to find it was about 25GB. But one day, 25GB for a game will be the norm.

Things get better. More resources are needed for richer digital content. It was just as easy to 'survive' back then as it is now, as files used less space and programs required less RAM.
 
Blackberryroid said:
Don't you ever rip CDs? Or rip DVDs/CDs?
Click to expand...

Nope. We didn't.

I had a Discman for when I wanted to listen to music on the go. Had a little bag that held it and about 12 CDs.

Before that was a Walkman and mix tapes.

Before that, nothing. You sat and listened to music.

Certainly didn't rip DVDs, couldn't even play a DVD on my computer till I got my iBook in 2004. We had little 40MB RealPlayer videos of South Park and stuff on our Uni network. They were probably the biggest files I had on my computer at Uni.

Video only really became properly portable with the 5G iPod, it took my little iBook 3 hours to encode a 30 minute TV show in 320x240 H.264. That little guy sure got a work out.
 
jasonvp said:
What this guy said, right here.

The idea of storing media on a computer for later consumption just wasn't heard of.

jas
Click to expand...

I still have a huge blu-ray collection. No way am I wasting HDD space on lower quality movies when the plastic discs are just that much superior and already hold the information.
 
KnightWRX said:
I still have a huge blu-ray collection. No way am I wasting HDD space on lower quality movies when the plastic discs are just that much superior and already hold the information.
Click to expand...

I'll rip my Blu-Rays (but NOT transcode them) and store them on a media server so that I can watch them later without swapping discs and all. But the idea of compressing them into a different format? No way. They're stored in raw .ISO format, which, of course, eats up lots of HDD space.

jas
 
I have a lot of movies on DVD, but haven't bought an new ones in some time. Mostly switched to downloads now. I also used to have a stack of shows recorded from TV on VHS and a bunch of DVDs of TV shows and movies recorded to save room on my HDDs.
 
KnightWRX said:
I think the point was telling us he was born in the 1990s and only heard about personal computers when he came of age in the 00s.
Click to expand...

Judging age by the knowledge of computers in the past? Have you ever considered that the OP could be living in a third world country and got his first computer in 2005?
 
Blackberryroid said:
Let's go back to 1995 - 2003. When 5 GB is insanely huge and everyone was fine with 1 GB.

Fast forward to 2012. When every MacBook Air user complains about the 64GB storage on the low end version.

But back in the days, how did you store your stuff in there? Your photos? Your music? Videos? Documents? Keynote Presentations?

And how did a floppy disk become enough for transferring files? I need 2 of those to fit a song.
Click to expand...

You actually think mp3 files, pictures, or other files are as big as today's version of it?

Many files were in bytes and kilobytes back then. A mb of file would contain a lot of stuff back then.

No offense, but questions like these shows your age...
 
SandboxGeneral said:
Wow. I still recall using computers that had no HDD at all.
Click to expand...

This.

My first personal computing experiences were with tape based personal computers like the HP-85, Apple ][ and ZX80, ... A random access floppy was a luxury.

I remember populating individual DIP memory chips on a 1 MB expansion card for a '286 back in grad school.

B
 
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