80 Megabytes of Storage for Under $12K!

Sometimes the study of history involves rather recent events. For instance, computer history is usually less than 50 years old. Now Computer World has highlighted a number of computer ads from the past forty years or so. Compared to today's technology, they sound even much older than what they are.

For instance, consider the 1977 ad for "this 80MB disk system for less than $12K -- and even better, 300MB for under $20K!" ($20,000 US). Not irresistible today, but apparently this was a bargain back when the ad was published. So good, in fact, that those prices were valid only for resellers buying at least 40 systems. Today you cannot find disk drives as small as 300 megabytes. In fact, you can now purchase half-terabyte drives (that's 500,000 megabytes) for about $130.

I especially enjoyed the ad for electronic mail. First, the advertisement was from my employer of those days, and the address in the ad was for a small office building where I worked at that time. Next, the ad had to explain what electronic mail was because most people were not yet familiar with the term: "Simply put, it means high-speed information transportation. One of the most advanced methods is terminals talking to one another. Your mailbox is the terminal on your desk. Punch a key and today's correspondence and messages are displayed instantly."

Finally, I was amused to see the ad proclaim, "Your mailbox is the terminal on your desk," and yet the man in the picture clearly had no such terminal on his desk. In those days, computer screens and keyboards were only given to clerical workers, never to managers. I obtained my first management position in that building and immediately placed an expensive ($3,000+) computer "dumb terminal" on my desk. My boss advised me to take it out because keyboards were "inappropriate for managers." That's even more amazing when you realize that we worked for one of the larger computer manufacturers of the time!

At the office, we used Penril modems, as shown in another ad. They moved at a "blinding speed" of 1,200 bits per second. If identical modems were in use on both ends, the modem could quadruple its speed to 4,800 bits per second. Today, a "slow" dial-up modem is roughly 45 times as fast at 56,000 baud (roughly 56,000 bits per second although baud rate is not exactly the same as bits per second). The Penril modems were bigger than most of today's PCs and cost several times as much.

One of the more modern ads is from 1987, only twenty years ago. It describes an NEC MultiSpeed laptop computer as "small and lightweight" at only 11.2 pounds. (Today's laptops typically are half that weight or less.) The laptop contained 640K of memory, dual 720K floppy disk drives and five built-in programs. It also ran the OS/2 operating system in order to leap the 640K wall. Of course, installing more than 640K of memory was an extra-cost option.

Does anyone remember OS/2? I used it at the office and on my home computer for several years. (I had a new boss by that time and was allowed to have a PC on my desk. None of the other managers did, however.) Indeed, OS/2 was the first operating system to easily break through the earlier limitation of 640 kilobytes of RAM memory. Today's typical less-than-$500 computer usually contains 500 to 1,000 times that amount of memory.

The ad doesn't mention the fact that the NEC MultiSpeed laptop had a black-and-white screen and no hard drive. That wasn't mentioned because, at that time, the same was true of all laptop computers! None of them had color screens or hard drives; so, potential customers never looked for those features.

Studying computer history is a great way to appreciate today's technology. For many of us, it is also a trip down memory lane.

You can read this great article about computer history at http://tinyurl.com/33g63j.

Comments

[martin tolley]

"Very" recent computer history can be depressing. Only about three years ago I bought a flash memory plug in for my USB port - 256Mb for gbp 86, and it changed my life being able to store and transfer sooooo much data. Last week a 400Gb drive no bigger than a small paperback book cost me gbp 79, and this week the store has them on discounted special offer!!!

[Happy Dae]

Dick:

I have an entire garage full of those bargains...which I'm willing to sell for the ridiculous price of $4,000. OK, don't everyone call at once, but I've hundreds of GEDCOMS on those drives, which I've since burned to CDs, that may just be worth the price.

Happy Dae.

[Dennis Hawver]

Great! But--where's the Radio Shack TRS-80, that we affectionately dubbed the Trash 80?

[Laura]

I bought a 1TB drive last weekend for $370. That amount of storage boggled my mind, but I will probably max it out like all my other, smaller drives with backups, movies, and images. I'm not sure if terabyte was even in our vocabulary five years ago, not to mention thirty! What I found most rewarding was that the specs listed Mac compatibility first - another welcome improvement!

[Pat Sharp]

I remember having a Leading Edge (IBM clone)in the 80s. It had 2 floppy disks & my husband took it in to have a 40mg hard drive installed. The small computer shop argued with him and said no computer would ever need a hard drive that large. Finally the shop owner agreed and the drive cost a couple hundred dollars. What does it take to run Windows alone these days?

[Ben Walker]

My first pc was a mail-order Zeos with no color, 4 K memory, 80 Meg hd etc. It cost about $3000. I thought it was great with its 20 Mhz processor which was just below the top available 25 Mhz! I upgraded this several times--8 K memory, a second 80 meg hd, color graphics etc. Those were the days.

[Jeannette]

I recall taking a computer class in 1980 and the teacher discussing what a "gigabyte" was. He said we would never have to think in those terms for our personal computers. Terabyte? That was only for huge business purposes!

[Chad]

Pretty soon we will be commonly talking about petabytes and exabytes.

[Holly Hendricks]

My younger co-workers looked skeptical when I told them of the excitement in the office the day my DEC Pro 350 had its own hard drive installed! It was the size of a shoebox and held 10 mb.

Holly

[K Paul Graham]

My first, in 1980, an Apple II+ It was the CPU only. I fed an rf signal to a small b&w TV. Since floppy drives were not yet available, we used tapes to save our keyboarded program with only one pass to save to tape. Usually took several attempts to get onto the tape.
Floppy drives were so-o-o much better. Then I got a Sider D1 hard disk drive. The printed manual said that the 10 million characters of disk storage would be more than I would ever need. In 1988 the Sider D2 successor at 20+ megabytes allowed me to use four different operating systems stored in its own partition: DOS, ProDOS, CP/M and Pascal. Now, my Intel MacMini will run at least three OS. And how about those early impact printers?
K Paul Graham

[Linda Masden Vixie]

My father, Glenn Masden, worked under Seymour Cray in 1955-56 at Remington Rand Univac in Minnesota. He designed and built the memory unit for the first computer (the Univac) to use transistors. He still has some of the documentation and parts from that project. Transistors cost $1 each then, and some of those they bought were defective, he says (those are the ones he has). They weren't sure that transistors would work (to replace vacuum tubes), and other teams were trying other technologies as well.

[Mary Grindol]

Thanks for the trip down memory lane. The first computer I ever saw, at a hospital where I was a student nurse in the 50's, filled an entire room. There was no such thing as a personal computer in those days.

Does anybody remember BBSs? These were electronic Bulletin Boards where you could post genealogy and other queries. The Bulletin Board moderator (what were they called? Master? Captain?) was usually a computer guru who put out his own money to manage the site (site's not the word they used - there was no real WWW yet) and hoped for contributions from those that used it. There were usually a variety of topics. Because of his or her voluntary status, BBSs were often short-lived - especially in a small town (yes, it was pretty local). Hard to believe!