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

[GimmeSlack12]

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.

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

Using a 56k modem was not unbearable, but man... it left you dieing for more speed. Seeing high-speed internet at my university was incredible.

People weren't doing most of these things because they hadn't been invented yet. HD video didn't exist on computers yet since the resolutions of the monitors was not available. Again, back in the 90's a 17" monitor was considered massive! I remember getting one in 2001 and thinking that I could die a happy man (though I was barely 20 then).

And 10 megapixels!!??!?!? That was such crazy talk no one ever muttered the words.

 

[thekev]

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.

You're right about rolls of film. Regarding the way photographs are dealt with digitally, there's more to it. Imaging programs from the 80s couldn't deal with the same levels of resolution, and anti-aliasing was an actual part of the workflow (looked this up). In terms of 1990s through to today, the amount of information that got chucked around by programs like photoshop or painter was still up there. It had to be written to disks as there was no feasible way to hold all of that in ram. Brushes sampled in a much rougher manner too. They worked with what was available at the time. I've looked into some of this as it interested me.

 

[Hastings101]

Probably because I didn't store anything but Word/Powerpoint documents and a few games on a computer back then. I never noticed it was a problem on my Gateway desktop with around 5gb of storage space, from 1998 when my parents bought it for me, until 2002ish when I tried to install Warcraft III on it and found out it required a whopping gigabyte of space. Really shocked me when everything else I had was 100mb or less lol

Couldn't do it now, I put everything on my computer and even a Terabyte of storage is barely enough

 

[G51989]

Computers did a lot less.

Its not so much that they did less, they could do almost everything they can do today by the mid 90s, it was just a matter of how much money you had

 

[throAU]

Its not so much that they did less, they could do almost everything they can do today by the mid 90s, it was just a matter of how much money you had

They "did" a lot less because it was not practical, and the technology hadn't been developed/popularised.

486s (or 680x0s) didn't really have the grunt for mp3, high def video, etc. So it didn't end up on user's desktops.

Network bandwidth was far lower, so the amount of data ending up on PCs was far less, too.

They certainly could not do everything they can do today, in practical terms.

Toy Story for example was rendered on a multi-million dollar rendering farm, these days a high end 3d processor on an average PC could render it in real time...

 

[mscriv]

Wow... you people with all of your talk about MB's, floppy disks, and processor speeds. My first computer was made of wood, was hand powered, and only processed as fast as I could. But hey, it did come in color.