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Sale - 1.5 TB Freeagent Desktop Hard Drive $99.99


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Remember when a 1TB backup drive cost nearly $800 and was the size of a large dictionary?

Heck, I remember my first job as a computer operator back in 1967. You could open man sized doors and walk through parts of it. It had 20Kb of memory! Just tape for data storage.

A few years later the company switched to IBM (transistors instead of valves and a whopping 256Kb memory). It came with a bank of disc drives, each the size of a small washing machine. Supposedly each removable multi-level disc could hold 7mb of data. I'm not sure the word Gigabyte had been invented, but if it had, it was just a crazy dream.

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Yep...stuff changes. This whole intertubes thingy is kinda neat too!

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Add me to the list of old computer geeks. First system was a Digital Equipment Corportation VAX 11-780. Roughly the size of two refrigerators for the CPU. Had three disk drives, each the size of a washing machine. It was housed in its own glass room in the lobby of the building so everyone could gawk at it.

Next to it we had a DEC PDP 11-70. Black with purple highlights. Had 16 toggle switches on the front panel. You had to manually set the toggle switches to a specific sequence to get the system to boot. It also had 16 colored lights that blinked in certain seqeuences depending on which operating system was running.

Those were the days of centralized computing. One huge computer shared by hundreds of people. Everyone had dumb terminals on their desk instead of PCs.

Remember we had a series of intermittent system crashes for a week or so. We started pulling out boards to check stuff. A loose screw bounced out. It seems the loose screw would rattle around and short out stuff causing the system crashes.

Another time we had to upgrade the system so we opened up the back doors and changing the wiring by litterally wrapping wire around various posts and runs the wires to other posts. None of that namby pamby board swapping.

Software updates came on tapes. Reel to reel tapes. 1 inch thick and about the size of a record album.

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"Replacing a bad tube meant checking among ENIAC's 19,000 possibilities." (U.S. Army photo, from archives of the ARL Technical Library, courtesy of Mike Muuss; caption from Martin H. Weik, "The ENIAC Story").

The heat from all those tubes must have been stifling. 1947.

I'm a newbie myself, first bought a used PC in '92. I think it had a 1.2 Meg HD.

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