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

Carlanga said:
oh you kids and your GB & TB...
... I had a fighter game that used 8 floppies & that was like 11MB and that was considered huge in that time! :cool:
... :)
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Oh, I'd forgotten about those multiple floppy installations...

I had the WordPerfect office suite - I think it was owned by Novell at the time, iirc... but it was the full-suite. Came in a box that weighed like 7kgs. Inside the box was the printed manuals - real paper, thick, indexed, etc. And at least 30 floppies - the new plastic cased ones. You'd put the first "installation #1" floppy in, run the "setup.exe" application and start to read the manual - because you were going to be there for a while, listening the whirring and grinding, looking up occasionally to see if it was time to pop the floppy out and put the next one in. Keeping your fingers crossed the computer didn't hiccup.... 'cause then you'd have to fix the hiccup and start all over again.

Then - you'd sometimes find one of the floppies was corrupted. And you'd call their support number. Perhaps they would give access to their magical FTP server and you could download the contents of the floppy, format one of your own disks, copy the content, and .....start with floppy #1 again. Sometimes they just had you manually copy the contents of another floppy to a directory. Sometimes they sent you a new floppy in the mail - so you had to wait to finish the installation until it arrived.

I also had OS/2, that come with a gazzillion floppies. Sigh.... the good old days, eh?
 
NewAnger said:
OS/2 Warp, yeah! I remember trying that. It ran so slow on my computer that I got a refund for it and went back to Windows 3.1.
Click to expand...

It got better.... much better. Eventually it even ran Windows 3.1 better than a native W31 installation did. I stuck with it until I moved to OS X 10.4.

A little remembered project saw IBM (OS/2) and Apple (or was it Next? I forget now) cooperate to create something Taligent.... an object oriented OS. The two corporate cultures didn't mesh well, and the project fell apart... but I'm convinced some of the ideas behind OS/2 made it into OS X. IBM had something really revolutionary with OS/2. I can only imagine what would have happened with it had they had someone like Steve Jobs to run with it. OS/2 still lives on as eComStation....
 
5GB? 64GB?? LOL
For home:
Music: Lossless 24-96 at least. 1.5GB/per album. Yeah! Not 50megs of mp3s lol.
Photos: RAW image files from a canon 5d mk2/3 are 25-30MB each.
Movies: i use bluray 30-40GB for each movie. iTunes "HD" sucks lol.

I now have a 24-bay home NAS with 24 x 2TB drives.


For work i use much much more space, as i shoot lots of images and video.;)

P.S. Last year 14 drives died on me, lol. :))
 
GimmeSlack12 said:
Mp3's weren't that prevalent until the early 2000's. That's when the CD burner boom began.

Also, downloading MP3's in the 90's made very little sense. The files were between 3 to 5Mb. Good luck waiting 50 minutes per song on a 56k modem.
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Ahh the burner boom... I purchased my first burner, an HP external, which used parallel to connect for $400
 
jaysen said:
Ahh the burner boom... I purchased my first burner, an HP external, which used parallel to connect for $400
Click to expand...

Mine was a LaCie 4x2 SCSI. **** took forever to finish a damn disc, and the discs were not something you wanted to go wasting!

Pompiliu said:
5GB? 64GB?? LOL
For home:
Music: Lossless 24-96 at least. 1.5GB/per album. Yeah! Not 50megs of mp3s lol.
Photos: RAW image files from a canon 5d mk2/3 are 25-30MB each.
Movies: i use bluray 30-40GB for each movie. iTunes "HD" sucks lol.

I now have a 24-bay home NAS with 24 x 2TB drives.


For work i use much much more space, as i shoot lots of images and video.;)

P.S. Last year 14 drives died on me, lol. :))
Click to expand...

How do you have that all organized? For someone to have 48TB at home is something pretty incredible. never throw anything away EVER!
 
I use a 10 GB HDD for all of my stuff :). Except for music, where I use about 50 GB on an external drive.
 
Blackberryroid said:
That's 56 kbps, right? So it just takes 5 minutes to download an mp3.
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56 kbps max, which never happened. (Also, difference between kilobits and kilobytes which I am too uneducated to explain.) I had dial-up for years, never got any higher then 32 kbps.

I had 10 GB hard drives in my earliest machines, but I never filled them. I didn't store photos or music or videos on my computers, those were all physical media at the time. I never had a lot of applications, I had a core few I used and that was it.

It wasn't until we got in the era of having 60-80 GB HDD's I began to store such things, so it was never a problem for me having hard drives that small.
 
I used a "personal" minicomputer at work back in the early 1970's. It had a 2.5MB 14" hard drive and 56KB of RAM and cost $25,000 which I guess would be more than $100,000 in today's dollars. The first computer I owned with a hard drive (mid 1980's) had a 20MB drive. I never got it more than half filled.
 
VulchR said:
My first computer - a Compaq suitcase machine in which the keyboard was attached to the bottom of the case when traveling.
Click to expand...

That was mine as well! I had dual floppies and 256k of RAM. I later upgraded it to 384k by adding 128k of DIP chips. Cost me about $200 for those 9 chips (yes 9, it used parity). Eventually I added a 10MB Hard Card to it. Love that little computer. Kept it for years.
 
CylonGlitch said:
That was mine as well! I had dual floppies and 256k of RAM. I later upgraded it to 384k by adding 128k of DIP chips. Cost me about $200 for those 9 chips (yes 9, it used parity). Eventually I added a 10MB Hard Card to it. Love that little computer. Kept it for years.
Click to expand...

I sold mine to get a MacPlus, but I still have great memories of it. The thing was built like a tank and had a remarkably clear screen for its time. I gather from the person I sold it to (a writer), the machine lasted for more than a decade. I hope some museum somewhere is preserving some examples of these early innovative computer designs.
 
snberk103 said:
Oh, I'd forgotten about those multiple floppy installations...

I had the WordPerfect office suite - I think it was owned by Novell at the time, iirc... but it was the full-suite. Came in a box that weighed like 7kgs. Inside the box was the printed manuals - real paper, thick, indexed, etc. And at least 30 floppies - the new plastic cased ones. You'd put the first "installation #1" floppy in, run the "setup.exe" application and start to read the manual - because you were going to be there for a while, listening the whirring and grinding, looking up occasionally to see if it was time to pop the floppy out and put the next one in. Keeping your fingers crossed the computer didn't hiccup.... 'cause then you'd have to fix the hiccup and start all over again.

Then - you'd sometimes find one of the floppies was corrupted. And you'd call their support number. Perhaps they would give access to their magical FTP server and you could download the contents of the floppy, format one of your own disks, copy the content, and .....start with floppy #1 again. Sometimes they just had you manually copy the contents of another floppy to a directory. Sometimes they sent you a new floppy in the mail - so you had to wait to finish the installation until it arrived.

I also had OS/2, that come with a gazzillion floppies. Sigh.... the good old days, eh?
Click to expand...

Oh man, does this bring back memories. I can still hear the OS/2 vs. Windows (Compuserve) forums arguments.

"I can format a floppy and type in my text editor at the same time, can you do that on Windows 3.1"

Only recently did my OS/2 Warp coffee mug finally lose all of the graphics due to being run through the dishwasher so many times.

And my first computer experience was my Dad's Atari something or other but only used that to play a text based adventure game.

In college our lab had some of the IBM PCs - dual floppies and all.

I still remember thinking High Density floppies were awesome.
 
jamojamo said:
Oh man, does this bring back memories. I can still hear the OS/2 vs. Windows (Compuserve) forums arguments.

"I can format a floppy and type in my text editor at the same time, can you do that on Windows 3.1"
Click to expand...

You can tell if someone is an OS/2 user because they keep asking their friends if they have any floppy disks they want formatted.

(That was my main home OS for about 5 years in the early 90's. I ran a BBS and OS/2 was the way to go.)
 
talmy said:
You can tell if someone is an OS/2 user because they keep asking their friends if they have any floppy disks they want formatted.

(That was my main home OS for about 5 years in the early 90's. I ran a BBS and OS/2 was the way to go.)
Click to expand...

Same thing here. I ran OS/2 at work since it was released and didn't even have much of a GUI. We wrote a lot of software for it for in-house use. I loved the OS, and it was way ahead of it's time. Just IBM had no idea how to market it. I used it to run my BBS as well, small world. :D
 
jamojamo said:
Oh man, does this bring back memories. I can still hear the OS/2 vs. Windows (Compuserve) forums arguments.
...
Only recently did my OS/2 Warp coffee mug finally lose all of the graphics due to being run through the dishwasher so many times.
....
Click to expand...

talmy said:
You can tell if someone is an OS/2 user because they keep asking their friends if they have any floppy disks they want formatted.

(That was my main home OS for about 5 years in the early 90's. I ran a BBS and OS/2 was the way to go.)
Click to expand...

OS/2 was so much more than that too, when it matured. I remember the built in, web browser (or was it an email client?) when the internet was still in it's infancy. And there was a 3rd party calendar/reminder/to-do application called Relish that was using free-form data entry to create it's entries. So typing "Lunch at noon on January 31st 2012" would create that event. Plus it did so much more.... I suspect some of those engineers ended up at Google....

Plus there were font palettes, colour palettes.... everything was drag-n-droppable... sigh... the launchpad, with drawers - those were the days.

OS/2 'coulda been a contender, eh?

It just looked butt-ugly....
 
It doesn't seem like the OP has returned. Something that most people seem to forget is that the way hardware is used is often determined by its capability. Bleeding edge functions commonly require expensive hardware even though the same problems are solved years later on less expensive generic systems. It's quite simple even though most people don't really contemplate it. You want to accomplish something. You find a collection of electronics that can do this assuming it's actually feasible.

http://blog.quantel.eu/2011/03/the-quantel-paintbox-a-pioneering-computer-graphics-workstation/

Take a look at what came before photoshop on the Mac. This was out 10 years earlier. It cost a fortune, but it was what was available. Regardless of bleeding edge nature, if something is both feasible, functional, and reliable (can count on it to make deadlines), someone will find a use for it.

In terms of content such as movies and music, consumers wouldn't have stored it on their computers in prior eras. VHS would have been more common at that time simply because it was distributed in a form that made sense at the time.
 
talmy said:
Not to this thread, probably because it has gotten way off topic. Looking at his other posts, he seems to be struggling fitting his stuff in a 128GB MBA.
Click to expand...

It's still a fun thread. It makes me sad that it died down:(. The progression was interesting. I tried to make something on topic that explained it via context. I mean that in the sense that I was trying to explain that people used computers for things where they were a good match during that era.
 
Back in time a raw file from my camera was not 20MB; that was the size of my first hard disk for Atari ST.

My first computer ZX81 even had only 1kB RAM, 768 for free use. Sometime I miss that time where you could listen to the bits from tape.
 
Everyone was not fine with 1 GB. It's just that consumers couldn't afford it. Professionals who needed more relied on storage servers and large memory arrays. Photographs were usually kept on rolls of film, music was stored on tapes or CD, videos were stored on tape, and documents were usually small because they didn't include content other than text characters. The availability of inexpensive data storage has given rise to digital content distribution, and inexpensive RAM has given rise to more dynamic software.
 
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...


Back in those days, people weren't storing vast amounts of high def video. Video they had was encoded at some crappy bit-rate, and their music was all 128kbit MP3 - or still on physical CD. Or, if it was digital, before MP3 was stored in 11khz or 22khz 8 bit at best. Downloading? as mentioned above 56k modems can't download things very fast - rather than downloading several gb per hour, you'd be lucky to get a couple of hundred meg in 24 hrs.

Games used to run from CD, rather than doing a full install. Swapfile was a lot smaller, as memory was a lot smaller. Game content was for 800x600 resolution, and textures were 256x256 to fit in a voodoo 2 3d accelerator, or smaller for software rendering. Polygon counts on 3d models were a lot smaller, as the 3d processors were not as strong.

People weren't taking photos with 10+ megapixel DSLR cameras, and storing them all in RAW format on their machine.



Computers did a lot less.
 
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