Post by David Von PeinPost by John CorbettI hope you have your archives well backed up.
Yes, indeed, I do. Backed up in three places, in fact.
And it's a good thing the size of computer hard drives and external hard
drives have increased by leaps and bounds since I bought my first computer
in 2000. My first PC had a hard drive that was measured in megabytes,
rather than the terabyte I have now. In those "old days" of tiny hard
drives, I wouldn't be able to store any long videos at all. I would have
probably needed 3 of my first Gateway PCs to store just one three-hour
video of average 480p quality.
I had the first generation Mac. 512K of memory. I thought that was a lot
because the IBM 370 mainframe I worked on when I got into the programming
field had 512K. The technical school I attended after I left baseball had
a Univac 9200 with 8K of memory. I think my toaster oven has more than
that now. They replaced it with a IBM 360 which had 64K of memory. It was
already obsolete which is why our school got it cheap, but we thought it
was awesome. What did we know?
The standard storage for the Mac was the 3.5" floppy. I had lots of those.
Mostly what we stored was data which requires little space and even the
graphics were monochrome which requires a lot less than color. I ended up
buying a 20M hard drive that was the size of a toaster. A friend of mine
said after ten years of storing things on it, it would probably say 1%
full.
The amazing thing was the cost. My first Mac cost $2800 in 1984 dollars.
My inflation calculator tells me that would cost $6974.69 in today's
dollars. By the 1990s I had switched to IBM clones and those would cost
about $2000 every time I upgraded which would almost be necessary about
every two years. Now they practically give away the hardware and make
their money on software. I've had the same laptop now for about 6-7 years
and my first laptop was about the same.