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March 31, 2008
The 1/4 Terrabyte Drive
I remember, back, what? Twelve, thirteen, maybe more, years ago -- installing one gigabyte of storage in a desktop computer I had. A whole gig! Of course, to do this I had to use a 600 meg drive and a 400 meg drive. Or a seven-something and a two-something. In any case it was two drives.
Not terribly long after that Fujitsu brought out a one-gig drive for $99.00. It was amazging. A whole gig for under one-hundred bucks. Just imagine, a person could now have all the data they'd ever need on a single drive and still have 900 megabytes left over ... just in case. And, as this was in the days before high-speed Internet everywhere and easy-access Internet porn, "just in case" hardly ever came up; let alone anything else.
Another hard-drive memory involves the first 40-meg drive that came into the facility I worked at. DOS (3.2? 6? I don't remember) only recognizd 32 megs so the drive had to be divided into two partitions.
At the time we were running Wordperfect for DOS. I don't remember all the details but we needed to intsall it on a computer with a full hard drive (maybe to replace MultiMate) and we didn't have enough space. As I recall we deleted something like two megs of data -- maybe more or less -- which was all WordPerfect needed to get it to go in.
This, for those of you still reading, was also during the days in which we were running PageMaker on a 286. It ran using a run-time version of Windows -- a product I'd never heard of that I think was in version 1.x. The PageMaker manual suggested, and I'll make a number up here, that the program would run best with 586K, of the 640K, installed conventional memory. To get whatever the number was required loading drivers into extended memory.
And while my memory may be fuzzy on that and how it all worked, my memory is clear as a bell when it comes to remembering having something like 584K available and PageMaker running like a dog and then getting the magic 586 freed up and having the program take off like nothing else.
Fast forward to today and I'm installing a 1/4 terrabyte drive in my notebook computer. I will now be able to lose more data than used to exist in all the known universes in a single hard drive crash. (Doesn't 1/4 terrabyte sound so much bigger than 250 gigs?)
Rather than just clone the drive and transfer everything over I've taken the step of reinstalling the operating system from the ground up. It seemed like time.
Posted by delmer at March 31, 2008 12:21 PM
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Αυτο ειναι για μενα ολα τα ελληνικα. Δεν καταλαβαινω λεξη σου καιγεται καρφι ειστε sayin '.
* Skulks μακρια συναισθημα πολυ ανοητος *
-----------------------------------
Translated in plain English, the above means:
That is all Greek to me. I don't understand a damn word you're sayin'.
*Skulks away feeling very stupid*
~ZZ
Btw - What does the 'Track back Link" do??
Posted by: ZZ at April 1, 2008 6:31 PM
"Terrabyte?" Yikes(but can I use it in Scrabble?)...
Posted by: Heather Dugan at April 1, 2008 9:29 PM
you started rich....lol.....mine was an IBM-pc with 2 120kb disks, 64kb on the motherboard and dos 2.1 with Wordperfect 1.1.clock speed 4.2Mhz
The machine is still there and working with a memory expanded to 640kb.
Oh.the notebook with 3.02 Ghz is something different. Thats what I use normaly.and....why not attach an external drive to your note book. You could loose your data on that one...
Posted by: Jack at April 2, 2008 11:39 AM
The mention of Pagemaker brings back memories for me. Version 5 was my first experience. I remember it used to crash if you went "save as" with non template files.
Posted by: Michael at April 3, 2008 9:58 AM