I remember paying $150 for 4MB of RAM!

My first computer was a 32K Radio Shack Color Computer which I immediately opened and modified to 64K. I can recall going to Rainbow Fest in Princeton, NJ each year and spending over a thousand dollars on new toys and software. I spent around $500 for a 10MB hard drive that was bigger than todays PC’s. I used to save all my reciepts until the file was too big and I threw it away. People don’t change much. Only technology and prices seem to change.

My first hard drive was a 20mb Seagate which cost $299.00 in 1987! Back then I thought it would take a long time to fill it up, but as we all know now, it didn’t take very long at all.

“I remember my first PC coming with a 1GB hard drive”

Youngster.

I remember when an 80-track, double density, double sided 5 1/4″ floppy was reasonable (at a couple of hundred $, I can’t remember how much now). I do remember looking at a 5 MB hard drive being available for $5,000, which was down from it’s original $8,000.

I overclocked a Model I TRS-80 to 8MHZ (stock was 4.66MHZ), which actually worked with the DRAM, but the video SRAM (static RAM) couldn’t handle the speed, scrolling locked the system up! Inserting a wait state fixed that problem. No soldering needed, just a circuit board, three wires to connect, and one trace cut.

The good old poor days.

“I can only image how frustrating it must have been to live with 10MB”.

It wasn’t anywhere near as bad as it is today because most data files were a matter of k not meg. Audio and video were not in use back then either. Most games came on one or more floppy disks. The operating system, DOS, used a minute amount of space compared to today’s GUI OS’s

OK, so it looks like time to admit to being the old fart on this list (I have computers tht are probably older than most Gnomies…).

I started out with with a Sinclair ZX80 (couldn’t afford the PET at £550). It had a mind-blowing memory of 1KB available to the user! Amazing what you can achieve in just 1KB when you are desperate… Certainly taught you to code efficiently. Thankfully I got the 16KB RAM pack a year later, so could play the more modern games. Storage was of course on your cassette recorder, no discs at all. Games could be found in almost every computer magazine, but you had to type them in and almost never worked it seemed.

Eventually I built my owh computer with a 286 processor from individual boards cast off by a business. It had a 6MB HD and I wanted one of the new 40MB ones I had been drooling over in a magazine, only to be ridiculed by a friend as “What do you want all for?”. Since he ran the computer dept. for a very large multi-national company…and the entire company was on a single 20MB disk… That was DOS for you!

Now I have a woefully UNDER-powered graphics card at “just” 128 MB and have just treated myself to the DVD recorder of my dreams (Pioneer) for Christmas - It has a built-in HD of 500 GB and an eSATA connector, so you can connect any ammount of external storage you like.

Some things never change - The one thing I wanted to do more than anything else with that 1 KB RAM on the ZX80 was to record TV on it as I couldn’t afford a video recorder and the ZX80. That was before I realised how much data is in video content. The ultimate irony? I bought a “Backer” card for the 486 I built, that allowed you to copy data onto a VHS tape in your VCR. technically it made the VCR an external “stringy floppy” drive.