wrote in message
...
On Mon, 16 Jul 2012 03:28:01 +0000 (UTC), gregz
wrote:

My first PC was a first day ship IBM PC-1 that cost about 2 grand
(employee price) with two 128k diskette drives, a tape recorder "mass
storage" and a whopping 64K of RAM. (Epson dot printer and mono
monitor)

Several years later I did the $300 WDWX1 controller/ST238 upgrade to a
hard drive but that also required a new system board.
My old one suddenly just "went bad" and I had to replace it on the M/A
... funny how that works huh?
I had a problem earlier with one of those diskette drives and needed a
new one too. They only had the 360K. ;-)

I'm thinking a large disk in mid 70's was about 20 kb or perhaps mb. ?
In 1969 loading a program by paper tape into a $10k pdp 8/I first required
you to manually machine code the program on switches so computer would
know
how to read the paper tape. Back when an oscilloscope was what you used to
fix computers.


In the mid 70s a big disk drive was a 3330 M11 and you got 200MB per
spindle on a removable pack. (ten 14" platters)

Two drives were about the size of a side by side refrigerator and the
standard array of 8 had a 60 amp 3 phase 208 power plug.

I worked on computers since they leaked oil on the floor and filled a
big room.

I started working for IBM in one of their Datacenters, the summer of '71.
just before I went to engineering school.
In those days, with overtime and being on call, you could make enough
money in one summer to pay for your school year.