Digital technology evolution

Struth, mass storage was a lot cheaper in May 1978:
http://www.dontronics.com/Tandy_V1_N1_Newsletter_P1.jpg

:-)

Don...

Mass storage?

http://www.labkron.com/prodimg/571.bmp


Andy Wood
snipped-for-privacy@trap.ozemail.com.au

Something wrong there.  I bought my first IBM clone PC around 1981.  A
top range AT running at a blinding 8 MHz.  40 MB hard drive. 14" color
monitor.  Total cost AU$3400.  A lot dearer than the couple of Apple II
machines I had before then, but a big step up.

The 10Meg ad. of Bob's refers to S100 bus, Z80m and CPM, which was a
little before the XT and clones appeared. Not much before, but it was prior.

81 saw the Dick Smith Challenger compatible.
Was that what you got Adrian?

Don...




Don McKenzie
E-Mail Contact Page:               http://www.dontronics.com/e-mail.html

Crystal clear, super bright OLED LCD (128x128) for your microcontroller.
Simple serial RX/TX interface. Many memory sizes.
http://www.dontronics-shop.com/product.php?productid16%460

It wasnt the DSE clone.  Put together by a small company in Adelaide.  I
have no idea now what the motherboard was.  And yes, it might have been
82, not 81.

Could it have been a Chendi?
was very popular at that time.

I know, they started to come out of the wood work around 81-82. It was
really the start of the Asian PC invasion that continues today.

Don...

I don't think it's wrong, we were still buying 25M winchester and Lark drives
(removable packs) in 1985/6 for this kind of price for mainframe storage. They
were about the size of a slab and easily as heavy. Then the PC, SUN and MAC
revolution hit us in about '87 along with networking and distributed computing.
No need for a huge machine room with special floors and aircon and big tape
drives and washing machines anymore.

. . .
 


Are you using "washing machine" as a generic term, or do you really
mean the IBM  2321 Data Cell, aka the "noodle picker" or "noodle
snatcher"?
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/datacell.html

Those were pretty rare - I never got to see one in action. I did
however see an equally bizarre device made by NCR - the CRAM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRAM


Andy Wood
snipped-for-privacy@trap.ozemail.com.au

computing.

Generic. I think they were probably DEC RP04's or RP06's.
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/rp06.html
http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/rp04.html

I do remember a nasty head crash on one of them, where the head launching
solenoid slammed the head stack into the side of the disk. Not pretty.

Aha! More like the IBM 3330, but IBM did not, as far as I know, have a
top loading version. Instead it had slide out drawers, along the lines
of the older 2314 "pizza ovens". It is really hard to imagine how many
THOUSANDS of those disks, with their 14inch diameter platters, it
would take to have the same capacity that you can easily hold in one
hand today.

Andy Wood
snipped-for-privacy@trap.ozemail.com.au

Nothing like the scream of stacked MFM drives :)

not 1981 with those specs.

Bye.
   Jasen

**Nah. Closer to 1985, I'd guess. 80286 (AT class) was not available until
well past the middle of the decade anyway. A 40MB hard drive in a PC clone
in 1981? No chance. Even by 1986, the 20MB Seagate was the standard fitting
in PCs up to about $3k. I paid around $500.00 for mine in 1986.

I dont have direct records from then, but I do have some 6502 boards I
designed in 1981, and a I know I wrote code for them, first on Apple II
and later on the AT clone running under MSDOS 2.  But you are right, the
AT was not introduced till early 1984.

So much for memory, both the HDD type, and wetware.

Some interesting history at:
http://www.computerhope.com/history/198090.htm

The first PC-AT's were announced by IBM in 1984 for $6000
IBM PC's OTOH were announced in 1981, with the first clone
in June 1982

Don't think it would be '81. In '85 my school bought a bunch of sperry
XT's with twin floppies and mono screen.  A year or two later my brother
got a 10MHz 286 clone with 40MB hard drive, 1MB ram and EGA graphics. At
the time it set him back a small fortune and was pretty much the best
that could be got. (It actually turned out to be an 8MHz 286 overclocked
to 10MHz). We were in a local computer club and no-one else had ever
seen a 40MB hard drive - my brother was pretty much considered a
megalomaniac, because no-one would ever need more than a pair of 360k
floppies or a 10MB hard drive. Around '89 I got an XT clone with twin
floppies, and added an 80MB hard drive around '90 that set me back about
a grand. By that time '386's were out but were worth a fortune. And to
think that I now carry in my pocket a device with a 312MHz CPU, a
320x480 screen capable of 65000 colours, 128MB of NVRam, 2GB of storage
on an SD card, and the whole thing set me back a fraction of what my old
twin floppy XT did.

    Apparently HDD prices were quite volatile in 1981. I looked at
"Historical Notes about the Cost of Hard Drive Storage Space" at
http://www.alts.net/ns1625/winchest.html which suggests that US$3300 for
that drive was within the 1981 price range.
    It's amazing to see how much the price/megabyte's dropped since
then. :-)
    NB: Prices on that site are in Canadian dollars unless otherwise noted.

Bob

On Thu, 16 Nov 2006 00:58:09 +1100, Bob Parker



I built up Steve Ciarcia's Micromint SB180 in mid 80's and a 20Mb NEC
low profile 5-1/4" MFM HDD set me back about $AU580.
http://www.wfms.org/sb180/index.html

I remember buying one very early 8088 clone 1980>81
  basic machine with no hd and a dot matrix amd amber screen was 2k then
the hard drive ( a huge 5 meg was another 1k  plus and luckily I had a
copy os dos 2.0
  all whole sale
  in 1982 I bought a colour cga for around $450.00