"What if" question

gigabytes to store digital stuff anyhow. Things were a

And imagine if they discovered the Windows Vista operating system on the drive.

Sure it was. Bob Widlar published his discussion of his design for the

709 in 1965, and I bought one - for $A30 - around then. The uA741 and the LM101 hit the market in 1967. TTL had been around since 1962, though production didn't match demand until around 1970 and the prices were correspondingly high until then. The DEC PDP-8 was built with transistors, but the TTL-based PDP-8I hit the market in 1968, and would have been under development in 1966.

They'd have been a bit puzzled by the read heads.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They might have been able to figure out that the data density on the disk was some four or five orders of magnitude higher than anyone could manage in 1966 - in 1980 my wife dropped a hard disk cartridge that slotted into a a hard disk drive the size of a washing machine, and managed to lose all of the data she'd stored in the 10 Mbyte of storage it offered.

I guess they might have figured it out how to get the extra density by

1988 ...

It would have looked pretty magical back then.

Compact disks weren't around in 1966

and while you could digitise audio and record it on video tape recorders back then, the particular encoding now used wasn't standardised until 1985 (J. Audio. Eng. Soc. volume 33 pages 975-984) so the lucky recipient would have had some trouble recognising audio tracks in the data in the disk.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Sounds like the right sort of budget to discover giant magneto- resistance for the read heads and develop the technology you'd need to build them.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

They had pretty fast tape drives. The real tapes, huge. Of course, to install one of these you had to clear out part of the living room and have the electrican run an extra mains line.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Until the first crash. Then the enthusiasm would quickly vanish.

--
Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com/

Spread spectrum (frequency hopping) was invented during WWII (1942) by Hedy Lamarr. US patent 2292387.

--
Keith