Does anyone remember megabytes?

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SRB said:
Wow, you're right - that price is high! :eek:
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Funny since I probably paid this price for a few megs a few years back.

At any rate I agree with you. My son actually bought a few 1TB external HD last month at Staples (sale) and used their online coupons...it came to less than $60.00 each!!! :eek:
 
Remember my first laptop, or better a portable computer - a Toshiba 1600 - had 1 Mb ram and a 20 Mb harddrive - this was before windows...That were the good old days, nobody knew what a gigabyte was....:biggrin:. This sucker was some $10000 - but my company was paying the bill for it.
 
I still have my first external hard drive somewhere up in the attic. It's a whopping 5MB hard drive and it's the size of a very large Nike shoebox.

I got an ad from Tiger Direct the other day for a desk top computer with 4 core CPU, 4 GB memory and 4TB hard drive for under $700 and the computer is not much bigger than my old hard drive.

Jim Smith
 
Got you all beat..........the first hard drive (external) that I bought was for a Radio Shack 4P. It's was on sale......half price.....$1,000 and IIRC it was a 10mb drive.

I later opened up the external drive enclosure and what did I find??? In the middle was a 5.25" hard drive and a fan at the back of the case......now the case was bigger than most PCs today and all it had in it was the hard drive......

Boy, we've come a long way!!!!


Barney
 
1st PC I used was a DEC Rainbow- $10,000; 2 160K floppies - no hard drive. Later upgraded with a 30 baud external modem.
 
In 1967 I was a salesman for a company in Tampa called Gulf Coast Business Machines and we just got in our first "Electronic Calculator" from a new company in Japan "Sharp"
it did the 4 basic functions, add, subtract,multiply and divide was slightly larger than a brief case and sold for $1500.00. Last week I was at the Dollar store and they had calculators for $.99 that had functions we couldn't dream of back then. A computer was not even to be imagined.

Oh! before Ed or Cav reply I was a very, very, very young salesman!
 
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I worked for Atari back in the day, still have an Atari 800 with 8K RAM and three(!) 16K expansion cards and a 360K 5.25" external floppy drive. Also the cassette data drive which is basically a repackaged tape recorder. And who can forget the blazing online speeds of a 300 baud modem? The power bricks for these things weigh more than today's laptops. About a grand for the computer and $500 for the floppy drive back in 1979.
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I also was the proud owner of a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 'laptop', fully loaded with 32K of memory and a 40x8 LCD display. $600 back in 1973. I was quite the cutting edge geek :biggrin:....
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Mike
 
had a Commodore 64 (with the cassette tapes)...was amazed at what it could do! Learned on the "Trash 80's" at school. Now the little webbooks are $249 at Target.
 
I was listening to a podcast about the software architecture of Ebay, and it was mentioned that at any given time they store about 2 petabytes of data. A petabyte is 1000 terabytes. Now, that's a lot of data!
 
Yeah my first computer was a Tandy TRS-80 Model 1, Level 1 - 4K RAM and a tape drive.

I think we paid about $1200 to go for the "big" upgrade from 4K RAM to 16K RAM and Level II basic, man we were the big wigs then!

Around the same time, my school got it's first computer, and Apple IIE. My teacher asked me if I could show him how to use it :p We spent many a lunch time playing Lemonade and Gorgon on that thing.

Russell.
 
I have an old apple II + computer that I bought from a friend. Two disk drives, and two paddles with buttons and turn knobs......
The Oddesy, wolfenstein, or a karate game were my favorites....
They are a far cry from Oblivion though.....
Now, my laptop has 2 cores, a 1920x1200 screen resolution, 3gb of ram, and a 768mb video card......and a one hour battery life.....
 
amosfella said:
Now, my laptop has 2 cores, a 1920x1200 screen resolution, 3gb of ram, and a 768mb video card......and a one hour battery life.....
Click to expand...

Haha, lets hope we see the day (and soon) where we are saying

"I remember when my laptop had a battery life of only one hour!!" or even

"I remember when my laptop used batteries!!!!".

Russell.
 
My first computer in 1980 was the Dragon 32 from England, Dragon Co was going to release the Dragon 64 and have the competition with Comodore for they release of the Comodore 64, Dragon 32 was equal as TRS-80, I was playing around with cassette tape:eek:
 
My first PC was a Radio Shack Color Computer......a whole 16k. Took it home opened it up.....did a little nip & tuck and double the memory! Got tired of using a regular tape recorder and got their computer tape recorder....worked better. Then I finally broke down and paid $650 for my drive '0' diskette......a little later got the drive '1' for $500.

I later bought the Tandy 100 then the 4P and even the old Model I's & II's (bought those used).

Buillt my first PC from haunting the swap meets......it was an XT (8086), got the math co-processor for it also......it was sure fun building those things with 'Pulls'.....(for the uninitiated.....parts pulled from bigger parts!). Went from XT to 286 passed the 386, went to the 486, and numerous versions of the Pentinums.

Man.......we've come a long way!!!


Barney
 
My first computer was an IBM 1401, which was considerably less powerful than most peoples calculators, let alone a PC. Weight a heck of a lot more, though.

Marc
 
My dad and I both got computers in the same year. He got a True Blue 8088 and I got a commode door 64
 
Sigh, I started with a Commodore 64!

When I computerized my office, I bought a Gateway with a huge 65 KB hard drive!! Windows 3.01 (?) didn't suck up much space at all.
 
Geez! This brings back memories! My first computer was an Apple IIe! No hard drive, 2 floppy drives (5.25") I started back to school with that "wonder!" When I graduated a few years later I splurged on a Tandy that had a hard drive! 2K RAM that I doubled before the week was out. "BeagleWrite" was my word processing progam - nothing that good since then.
 
My first computer was a Timex/Sinclair ZX81 it was the first $99 computer it came in kit form and had a membrane type keyboard and a whopping 1k of ram and used a plain cassette recorder to store programs , it used a TV for a monitor . I upgraded mine with a 16k ram module and a true click type keyboard . I even managed to buy a thermal printer for it .
 
I'm WAAAAAY too young to remember any of these things coming out, but I grew up around Apples that my parents used for graphic design. My dad had a vision way too far ahead of his time where he was actually creating computer animation and touch-screen kiosks back in 1991. He got strange looks from everyone he ever showed it to. He was from the old Cobalt and Fortran days and fondly recalls the times when he'd have a whole stack of punch cards, and then he'd accidentally drop the stack and spend half the day putting them back in order. Yeahhh......by the time I got to college we had Wifi on the entire campus and were streaming videos in class instead of listening to lectures....a different experience altogether!:embarrassed:
 
i started out with a commordore 64 and a neighbor of mine had a vic 20 with a seperate tape drive (cassette). to load a game, you would start it to load......go fix dinner and eat dinner then come back and wait just a little longer.......dayum!
least we not forget....... load "pong",8,1.........eh?

side note....... atari 2600????
 
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Atari 2600!! Still got mine with about 60 games. Summer of '83! I guess it has been a while!!:redface::biggrin:
 
My first was a Comodore 64, then I upgraded to a Zenith z120 with a 10MB hard drive, Wow what a change that sucker cost us nearly 5,000.00 but was IBM compatible.
Funny, some times I still miss DOS and the big floppy disks, at least there's still Linux.
 
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I hate to date myself but ----

NCR (National Cash Register) that had punched paper tape--no memory. The printer was part of the "computer." Had to insert each check into the printer and enter the check number on the keyboard. It was a six hour job to enter the ledgers and cheks for 150 person payroll. Cost around $30k!!!

How about a North Star Horizon? Two 520k floppy drives with no memory. Only about 18 hours to sort small car dealerships business for a month. That's something that the laptop I am working on now would take milliseconds to do now.

And has anyone heard of a Goupil Golf? It is arguable the first "portable" computer. Got one! Price is negotiable.

Ooh to be young again.
 
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