On 10/26/2015 8:10 PM, Vic Smith wrote:

I've always had plenty of disk space. Put a 30mb hard drive in my
original IBM PC soon after I bought it. Cost about $500, the price of
a decent used car in '84.

"Plenty" is a relative term! : I have 1T in each of my machines
and find that "just comfortable" for the work that I *do* on each
of those. A big problem is software nowadays drags in lots of
other cruft. E.g., when preparing a multimedia presentation, I
may have 250GB of "sound library" online just to sort out what sort of
"background music" should underly the presentation.

I had just started working on contract at McDonald's corporate in '95
and allocated about 500mb for some testing. Can't remember how many
cylinders, but it wasn't excessive in my experience. They were
probably still using 3380's.
Soon Data Management phoned me and told me I needed pre-approval
to allocate that much space. Okay. I was already done testing and
had freed the space.
Later I went for a smoke and was introduced to another smoker, who was
the head of the data management department. He said "You the Vic that
grabbed all my space?" I laughed and said I had 3 times that space on
my hard drives at home.
He said, "Bring 'em in here."

Early on, it was relatively easy for me to work-around disk space
issues with "offline" storage. As most of the apps were running under
DOS or UN*X, it was trivial to just move entire filesystems (or portions
thereof) off to 9T tape when not in use; then, move them *back* when
needed!

So, I would design a circuit and get the schematic finished. Save
the schematic (netlist) and discard all of the tools that I used to
create it (because they existed on a tape hanging in the closet!).
Then, load the PCB layout software from the "PCB" tape so I could
create the circuit board. Save that board, discarding the tools,
and load the software development tools so I could write the
software to *run* on that board. Etc.

At one point, I got a good price ($1006) on some 4G disks. So, I
bought 10 of them, copied the appropriate tools onto individual
disks and put 9 on the shelf. When I needed the tools on another
disk, I just swapped the "current" disk with the appropriate
"shelved" disk -- same as loading files from tape but without the
effort of actually reading tapes! :

Presently, I have taken that to its logical conclusion: set up
individual *machines* for individual (types of) tasks. Then,
just swivel my chair from Machine A to Machine B to Machine C, etc.

For older "system images", I have a VM server so I can "leave my chair
in one place" and just swap VM's! :-/

The biggest problem is keeping things sorted out in my *head*!
(I've learned to put printed labels on machines, disks, etc. so
I can sort out what I will need without having to power something
up just to see what it "has available"...)

On Sunday, October 25, 2015 at 8:29:27 PM UTC-4, Don Y wrote:
On 10/25/2015 4:58 PM, philo wrote:
I suppose I could also buy a spare...I pretty much have a spare...everything.

Must have at least 20 computers in the house and boxes of spare parts.

Old computers still retain functionality. An old modem may be a doorstop
once your ISP "moves on".

While some old PCs might still retain "functionality",
having 20 of them sitting around from a practical standpoint
seems about the same as having an old modem. Both are for
all practical purposes, all but useless. I can see maybe keeping one
7 year old PC, in case you suddenly decide you want some kind
of experimental monitoring machine, etc. But since my first PC,
I never put a single one back to use. When I was done with it,
that was it.

With a DSL modem, if it's functioning and you no longer need
it, first thing I'd do is see what they are selling for on Ebay.