Roland Perry Inscribed thus:

In message , at
16:19:28 on Thu, 24 Jun 2010, John Rumm
remarked:
IIRC I bought my first HDD about '87. A "huge" 42MB seagate.

By around 1981 I was the UK distributor for the Micropolis range of
drives, which were originally in the same form factor as an 8" floppy
drive. The most capacious was 33MB, and cost about the same a small
family car.

One of my customers was the BBC newsroom, who bought one to store
digitised images to project behind the newsreader's head - to replace
the infamously unreliable slide projector they used to have. In those
days it was difficult to find people who thought they needed that much
storage (outside of a classic mainframe scenario).

Couldn't resist, :-)
I still have my first ever hard disk drive, purchased in 1983/4. It has
four 5.25" platters and a linear stepper driven head. A whopping 5Mb.
Well in was in those days ! It still functions, though its more of a
showpiece nowadays.

--
Best Regards:
Baron.