Comments on Profile Post by YMO

Gigabytes were the stuff of dreams!

Terabytes only existed because the metric system said they would

Cloud storage is fun and all but nothing felt as cool as saving stuff to a floppy disk and keeping it in a treasure box

"Cloud storage is fun..."

Until the divine hand reaches out and crushes the virtual floppies.

(This is why you don't see many humans in pictures of data storage centres: too dangerous!)

My first HD had 40 MB, and I wondered how anybody could ever need so much space. (Actually, it was 2x20MB because MFM couldn’t do more than 20MB.)
But the coolest thing I ever had in terms of file storage was my first HD > 1GB. It was a 2GB HD, 5.25" full-height (3.25" high) drive that sounded like jet engine when it was powered up.

My first machines were servers, and had those "full-height" disks. Do they still exist? I don't think so.

I don't remember the capacity now, but I recall an IBM SCSI brick-size disk, warning on the box, "Dropping this disk as much as one inch may destroy it."

It also said something stupid like unwrap before use. WTF were they thinking?

Dude, as a kid I had to buy extra 3.5 inch floppies for my school project. That was 16 years ago. Technology, time flies...

3.5 inch... 5 inch... 8 inch...

Was there a 10-inch?

Ewwwwww don’t talk about me

I remember punch cards and the CDC-6400.

I didn't meet computers until late in life. Although I started with Unix, the DOS PC was already a thing (and, I thought, a very boring thing!).

I read an amazing article about *real programmers* of old. Apparently there were people who could take into account the rotational speed of the disc platter --- and for the stuff they did, it mattered!

... We all love *Big Buffers,* right?

But memory was once very far from cheap, and if a program was required to reliably and consistently process a data stream, then the above skill could make all the difference.