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How did you ever survive 1 GB - 10 GB of storage?
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I had the exact same thing..and it was pretty beige. Mine ran with 8 MHz but there was this magical turbo-button which boosted up to...wait for it..16MHz
Had fun times in the depths of the dos!
I've actually used punch cards for inputting programs and data - not a pleasant experience, particularly if your box of 100's of cards is accidentally dropped on the ground on a windy day....
My first hard disk was 20MB and cost $800. Still, it served me well during my doctoral studies.
My first computer - a Compaq suitcase machine in which the keyboard was attached to the bottom of the case when traveling. It was a great machine, but it was blown away by the Mac, which was my second computer:
My first hard disk was 20MB and cost $800.
Still, it served me well during my doctoral studies.My first computer - a Compaq suitcase machine in which the keyboard was attached to the bottom of the case when traveling. It was a great machine, but it was blown away by the Mac, which was my second computer:
I worked in a college radio station in 1993. A few of the guys decided that they wanted to see if they could set up a computer to run a radio show. So they used two computers, one to store and decompress the audio files and the other to play the files over the air. They got the system to work, but only had enough memory for about 2 hours on the air.
Today I could set up a play list on my iPod and go for a couple of days!
Today I could set up a play list on my iPod and go for a couple of days!
Mine was 25MHZ, 4MB RAM and had a 50 MB HD. I remember the first 1GB drive I ever bought and I thought I would never run out of storage. I think it was 1GB, that was back in 1993.
For photos, music and videos, people didn't. There was no point. iPods and other portable devices didn't exist.
It was hard enough trying to download one song. Dial was extremely slow and one song could take up to an hour or even longer to download. I also had to buy a modem for my first computer, it did not come with one.
I remember subscribing to these CDs that Compuserve started selling back then that had some videos on them. My computer was so bad that the videos just stuttered.
Things were not what they are like today where a song can down load in less then five seconds and we can watch HD video.
Post-production digital audio editing in 1991
For those who believe no one was using PCs to record or edit audio in 1995 (because it couldn't be done) here's a news release about Turtle Beach's 56K Digital Recording System from 1990. Largely because a complete system ran about $4000 it was used primarily by radio stations and mastering studios. You needed ~10 megs of storage for each minute of stereo audio that you wanted to record and you could also interface via S/PDIF or AES/EBU to a DAT recorder using the 56K-D Digital Interface Box.
The 56K Digital Recording System was released in 1991. The SoundStage digital audio editing software it used ran on Windows 3.0/3.1. Circuit board and interface box pics here.
For those who believe no one was using PCs to record or edit audio in 1995 (because it couldn't be done) here's a news release about Turtle Beach's 56K Digital Recording System from 1990. Largely because a complete system ran about $4000 it was used primarily by radio stations and mastering studios. You needed ~10 megs of storage for each minute of stereo audio that you wanted to record and you could also interface via S/PDIF or AES/EBU to a DAT recorder using the 56K-D Digital Interface Box.
The 56K Digital Recording System was released in 1991. The SoundStage digital audio editing software it used ran on Windows 3.0/3.1. Circuit board and interface box pics here.
Wait until I get the iPhone 6...
A friend and I 'invented' something like iTunes in 1988, but modems were too slow and the technology just wasn't there. He continued with IT and now owns a vineyard in California and drives a Porsche. I went into science and can't even afford to run a car now....
I worked in an office in 1986 that was doing some cutting edge stuff with PCs (they wrote software for hotels). One day a couple of the programmers there were remembering the "good old days". They figured today's programming students were pretty spoiled with the current hardware choices, as they could now write programs that were as big as 64kB ... that's 'kilobytes'. These two were saying that "real programmers" could write their programs to fit into a 16kB memory space... anything bigger was bloated coding.
Sigh.
My 1st PC was a 286, I opted for the fancy orange monitor. I also had a wireless mouse.... infrared connection, so it needed a line of sight. My messy desk was murder on the mouse connection. I had a sound card, but no music. A 1400 modem, iirc...
Ah yes, the good 'ol days....
And IRQs. I hated IRQs. It was OK when you get set jumpers or dip switches on the cards, but then they started with cards that could set their IRQs automatically. Maybe good in theory, but in practice when you had a combination of manual and auto IRQs that ended up fighting for their preferred IRQs and you'd get IRQ conflicts - and far less hair. Don't miss those days at all....
Sigh.
My 1st PC was a 286, I opted for the fancy orange monitor. I also had a wireless mouse.... infrared connection, so it needed a line of sight. My messy desk was murder on the mouse connection. I had a sound card, but no music. A 1400 modem, iirc...
Ah yes, the good 'ol days....
And IRQs. I hated IRQs. It was OK when you get set jumpers or dip switches on the cards, but then they started with cards that could set their IRQs automatically. Maybe good in theory, but in practice when you had a combination of manual and auto IRQs that ended up fighting for their preferred IRQs and you'd get IRQ conflicts - and far less hair. Don't miss those days at all....
I know I'm dating myself here, but when I added a 20Mb HD to my BBS, I was thinking "I will never fill this thing up!" Ditto my HST Dual Standard Modem. "This is as fast as it gets!"
OK. Now I feel old.
OK. Now I feel old.
The good ol' days..but strangely, when I'm buying nowadays, let's say 10 TB of storage space I would never think anything like "I will never fill this thing up!" anymore. The times are A changing.
My father worked for IBM in the 80s when IBM had the largest storage capacity in the world. 3000 sq. ft storage with 3ft diameter platters... maxing out at a capacity of 1TB.
Plus, 128 bits of memory!
He still has a hard time believing these 3.5" drives today have 4TBs!
Plus, 128 bits of memory!
He still has a hard time believing these 3.5" drives today have 4TBs!
My first desktop I bought had a 20 gig hard drive. I remember thinking when I paid over a grand for it how will I ever fill that! Now I gave a small 320 gig and I am waiting to buy a new iMac which will have a minimum of 500. How times have changed.
Where I used to work with PNC lathes the programes were stored on 7" floppies. Not a good idea in an engineering environment. No wonder they went bust! Still I got a nice kitchen with my reduncy!
Where I used to work with PNC lathes the programes were stored on 7" floppies. Not a good idea in an engineering environment. No wonder they went bust! Still I got a nice kitchen with my reduncy!
As has been mentioned numerous times already in this thread, people just really didn't have photos and music on their personal computers in 1995. My computer had a 40MB hard drive (with disk-doubling software to make it 80MB) until 1997. That plus a box of 3.5" floppies got me by just fine.
Also, document sizes seemed to be much smaller back then, as did applications. I just went back and opened an 8-page report of mine from 1996. It was 37KB. I copied and pasted it into Word 2011, saved it and it was 136k, nearly 3.5 times the size.
As far as applications, VLC Player alone now is a larger download than my entire hard drive back then. Microsoft Office comes in at about 1.3GB, over 30 times my entire hard drive back then. I recently deleted all my old installers from those days, so I don't know what a typical installer was in those days.
Of course the equipment existed back then, but it wasn't something simple that anyone with even a basic computer could do. You needed some pretty expensive equipment in those days. Nowadays, a budget laptop and a small cable can turn you into a recording studio.
Remember Zip drives? I was so jazzed when I got one of these. This was when I has a Mac IIsi with only 80 megs of storage. Zip 100 disks seemed like a godsend. Cheap, easy to use, and a lot more sturdy than Bernoulli disks.
Those were the days.
Those were the days.
The first computer I had when I was but a young child, was the Packard Bell 486 DX2 that he bought new, he then went with a fancy new Pentium System, so I ended up with the 486
75mzh Processor ( turbo overdrive of course )
8mb Ram
460mb ( Megabytes, not gigabytes lol )
2 floppy drives
****** CD drive
and a 1mb video card
At that time, all my movies were on VHS, my music was on cassette or CD's, and my pictures were taken with a Film camera. My books were....books....most of my gaming at that age was done on Super nintendo.
So, there really wasn't anything that would fill that space up, I think the biggest game I had was Doom II, and it only took up about 45mb, Sim City 2000? Think the whole game with all its expansion packs was something like 15mb. Quake? 15mb I think.
The biggest thing on the entire hardware was windows 95, and that only took up about 120mb
And at that time to listen to music on your computer, you didn't rip it onto your hard drive, you slammed a CD in the drive and hit the actual play button.
Or in the case of Sim City 2000, you could only really listen to in game music, or a CD, because you had to have the CD in, or the music wouldn't work in game. Even tho all the music files came out to a whopping 2mb
75mzh Processor ( turbo overdrive of course )
8mb Ram
460mb ( Megabytes, not gigabytes lol )
2 floppy drives
****** CD drive
and a 1mb video card
At that time, all my movies were on VHS, my music was on cassette or CD's, and my pictures were taken with a Film camera. My books were....books....most of my gaming at that age was done on Super nintendo.
So, there really wasn't anything that would fill that space up, I think the biggest game I had was Doom II, and it only took up about 45mb, Sim City 2000? Think the whole game with all its expansion packs was something like 15mb. Quake? 15mb I think.
The biggest thing on the entire hardware was windows 95, and that only took up about 120mb
And at that time to listen to music on your computer, you didn't rip it onto your hard drive, you slammed a CD in the drive and hit the actual play button.
Or in the case of Sim City 2000, you could only really listen to in game music, or a CD, because you had to have the CD in, or the music wouldn't work in game. Even tho all the music files came out to a whopping 2mb
oh you kids and your GB & TB...
I used to carry a floppy or two w/ me and took all my docs in it. When there was a lot of stuff I had a plastic case where I could put around 10 floppies inside and carry them & be protected.
In that time for home PCs' only games and documents needed to be stored. There was no movie, cd, dvd (not existed, but BETAMAX & VHS did) ripping at those times. I had a fighter game that used 8 floppies & that was like 11MB and that was considered huge in that time!
I remember when we bought a 56K modem to up the speed, we thought it was the next best thing since slice bread
I used to carry a floppy or two w/ me and took all my docs in it. When there was a lot of stuff I had a plastic case where I could put around 10 floppies inside and carry them & be protected.
In that time for home PCs' only games and documents needed to be stored. There was no movie, cd, dvd (not existed, but BETAMAX & VHS did) ripping at those times. I had a fighter game that used 8 floppies & that was like 11MB and that was considered huge in that time!
I remember when we bought a 56K modem to up the speed, we thought it was the next best thing since slice bread
My first Mac had a 5400 baud modem built in. I remember the jump to 14.4 and wondering what I ever did before I got so much speed.oh you kids and your GB & TB...
I used to carry a floppy or two w/ me and took all my docs in it. When there was a lot of stuff I had a plastic case where I could put around 10 floppies inside and carry them & be protected.
In that time for home PCs' only games and documents needed to be stored. There was no movie, cd, dvd (not existed, but BETAMAX & VHS did) ripping at those times. I had a fighter game that used 8 floppies & that was like 11MB and that was considered huge in that time!
I remember when we bought a 56K modem to up the speed, we thought it was the next best thing since slice bread
4MB of hard disk space was considered luxury.