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the first PC I really used already had a 400MB hard drive, I remember being worried when a single program would use more than 10-20MB lol.
 
ketchup79 said:
Yeah, that's how I read it as well. My first was a 486 DX 33 MHz, with the amazing TURBO button!
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Same here, AST brand back in the day with a whopping 200mb hard drive! Would probably cut that storage down a couple of crates. ��
 
StarTech said:
You are way off. The first IBM PC, if you want to start counting at that point had 64KB of memory and two 5 1/4" diskettes with something like 320KB of capacity.

You could add memory at something like $500 to bring it to 640KB.

With time, IBM released the PC-XT with super fast 80Msec hard drives with a capacity of 5MB. A few years later IBM released the first PC AT with the same memory structure, but came with base 256KB and 20 Msec, 20MB hard drives. Circa 1986.

Fully qualified gizzard here. I worked with punched paper tape and punched cards.
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confusion - i meant my 1st PC 🙂

around the same time, in my school they had 10 mhz (iirc) PCs with a turbo button. ahh, to install office with 28 or so floppy disks
 
SPBHM said:
the first PC I really used already had a 400MB hard drive, I remember being worried when a single program would use more than 10-20MB lol.
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I can't recall how large the HDD was in the 486 I used as a child (the first computer I was old enough to know how to use and had a say in the games for it). I know the first computer I ever used was my fathers 286 which was upgraded to a 20MB HDD from nothing.

I remember fondly installing Mechwarrior 2 Mercenaries on the 486 and taking up a good 60% of the entire system's storage with the single game. Back when every game came with a "minimum" install option but why would I want to do that and deal with CD load times!? Any time I wanted to play a new game I'd have to uninstall the old one.

When was it we could stop worrying about storage space for the most part? I remember Riven being (in addition to the most entertaining week of my childhood with my dad) one of those nothing else on the computer until it was removed games and that was on a p2 with a reasonable HDD for the time (3 or 4 GB). Still had to switch CDs every 15minutes. I really miss those kind of games (but not CD swapping)...

Now I have TBs more storage than I really need... I only ever have to uninstall a game because I'm cheap and only have a 256GB game drive SSD...
 
Eug said:
My first computer had no hard drive, just floppies. 5.25" in fact.

My first hard drive (early 90s) was 25 MB.
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Same except my first hard drive (1988) was 20MB and cost $379.00. MFM drive (couldn't afford an RLL drive, LOL). Had it low level formatted for an interleave of 3 to 1 for a year before I realized that it was supposed to be 4 to 1. After running a partition utility (Partition Magic? back then), it was 325% faster (425% overall) than what I was running it at. Of course, it was "so fast" that I didn't know the difference, LOL.
 
I have used a 286 computer with 20hz speed and 2 megs memory with 20megs HDD space. Used it to complete projects for an introduction to computers course.

It was a school computer and not my own. No internet available at the school.

I did not own a computer or use the internet until I was 24 years old. I am 40 years old now. lol!!
 
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Remobz said:
I have used a 286 computer with 20hz speed and 2 megs memory with 20megs HDD space. Used it to complete projects for an introduction to computers course.
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My first computer came with 48 KB. I upgraded it to 64 KB.


I did not own a computer or use the internet until I was 24 years old. I am 40 years old now. lol!!
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Really? You started using computers around 1997, even though you were already in your 20s? I bought my first computer nearly 30 years ago. Cost me upwards of 3 grand... for that 48 KB machine. Ouch. That was in 1984.

big-brother-is-watching-you1984.jpg
 
I remember interning at a corporate data center (IBM mainframes) and thinking with amazement how the whole, air-conditioned warehouse of IBM and Amdahl drive cabinets contained 20 GB of storage. This was the time period when I had an 8088 XT at home with a 20 MB hard drive.
 
My first PC was a 386SX, 16MHz. It had 5MB of RAM and a 105MB HDD. It was necessary to create multiple CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT files to allocate the memory differently for various games. Some games wanted XMS and others wanted EMS.

I wonder about that from time to time, what kind of stuff might still be going on in the background. Is there still a tiny 640k sliver of "Conventional Memory" that my CPU keeps separate from the rest of it?
 
I recently built a really nice 386dx40 out of era parts. SCSI except the floppy drives.

j0je.jpg

Outdated pic, this pic was of my 2x mke/panasonic interface drive and an atapi zip100 gen2.
I since put in a 2x SCSI CDROM and gen1 zip100 SCSI, and a different SCSI card.

My first IBM compatible PC was an 8088 overclocked to 12MHz. My first PC was a TRS-80 model III with dual floppy drives.
 
My first computer, the Comodore Vic20, had 4KB RAM and a cassette player for storage. It also had a ROM module you could plug in with games on it.

I started working for IBM on 01Mar1982 and ordered, at the end of my first month, thru the the employee purchase program, a first generation IBM PC that maxed out on the motherboard with 48KB RAM if I remember correctly. Over the course of the 11 months I had to wait for it I was able to modify the order to add the dual sided floppy drives at 320KB each.

I later added a RAM card with, I think, 256KB on it.

My next PC was the IBM PS2-Mod50 with a 20MB HD and MicroChannel buss. At the time (1986 I think) there was an old server room with an IBM carousel based HD system with a stack of something like 14" disks and the total capacity of that was the same as my Mod50 -- 20MB.

I'm hoping the next gen 2.5" HD's come soon as I NEED 2TB on my laptop to hold my images and video -- the Nikon D800E eats 50MB/picture...


Brian
 
Not only has technology vastly improved but prices have plummeted. My first desktop PC was a Gateway 2000 Pentium 75Mhz and 8 MB of RAM running Windows 3.1, 15" CRT monitor and cheap desktop speakers for around $2000 and that was back in the 90s.
 
rsutoratosu said:
my first pc was a trs80 model iii with 16k memory, in B&W with tape deck
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My first was a Timex Sinclar, i think it only had 4k of ram. I used a casette recorder to store the program.

Next came the Commodore 64.

Next was a real PC, a 286 based AT! I think it had a 40mb hard drive.
 
I remember when Windows could never get enough RAM, having to edit the config.sys and autoexec.bat and what not. Nowadays my RAM "problem" is one I would never have imagined I'd have back then, I have more RAM than I actually need or use (16GB). It's funny seeing posts soliciting ways they can utilize their extra RAM. Life is good. 🙂
 
bradley said:
This is even more effective and illustrative....

Inside Adam Savage's Cave: Geeking Out about Bits and Bytes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQWcIkoqXwg
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Fun, but I cringed every time they mixed/misused the terms "memory" and "storage"... two very different things.

And thumbs-up for the Texas Instruments TI99 4/a w/ tape drive. 😉
I miss my Tandy 1000... I had EGA-ish 16 colours when my friends had CGA's garish 4 or, worse, Hercules monochrome!

A 10 megabyte internal drive would cost $800. An additional 10 external drive was about $1000! Barely the same storage as only SEVEN 1.44MB floppy disks (but we were up to 40MB drives for $400 by then... I had twin 360k floppies.)
 
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Brian Stirling said:
My first computer, the Comodore Vic20, had 4KB RAM and a cassette player for storage. It also had a ROM module you could plug in with games on it.
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I thought about getting one of those because they were cheap, but decided against it because you couldn't actually do anything with it (except play a few crappy games). So, I waited, and got an Apple II+ knockoff in 83' or '84.

tynopik said:
got a system with a 340MB drive in '92, so . . .
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That must have cost a lot. Maybe I got mine right around 90. I can't remember exactly, but I was a really poor student at the time.
 
lakedude said:
Me too. :whiste:

punchcards.jpg
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Programming in FORTRAN 77, 72 characters was all you got because a line had it fit on a single card, even though cards hadn't been used in 15 years.


Also, spray painted gold, punch cards made most excellent Christmas wreaths.
 
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