For those who never have enough drive space — Timeline: 50 Years of Hard Drives

[Steve Wargo]

My first computer was a Tandy 1000 in 1985 which ran on MS-DOS 5 and had one 5 1/4″ floppy and 128K of memory. I added a second floppy drive and 256K of memory. A hard drive option was $375 for the 30Mb drive and $350 for the controller card. The CPU ran at a blistering 4.71 Mhz. I still have the entire computer and monitor. It still works like new. The CPU was $995 and the color monitor was $425. Isn’t it odd how you can still get a decent computer for around $1000 and a nice monitor for around $400. See, some things haven’t changed at all. A friend of mine brought a Macintosh computer home. It had a slot for a 3 1/2″ floppy and it was all built into one piece with a handle built in. With a long enough extension cord, I guess you could call it a portable.

In 1965, the average color tv was around $500. It still is.

VWs were about a dollar a pound (1800) and Big Twin Harley’s were $2000.

Levis were $5. Tattoos were $20

What else ya got Dave?

Steve Wargo
Tempe, Arizona

It’s a dry heat!

[Ed Dooley]

My first editing system was version 1.0 of Media 100 and the 4 Seagate Barracuda 3gig SCSI media drives cost $3,600 (each!) in 1993.
$14,400 for less than 12 formatted gigs.
Ed

[David Roth weiss]

My 1st media drive was a big and clunky Micropolis 2gb SCSI, for which I paid $1500. Quite an advancement from IBM’s first 5mb drive, which required 50 24-inch platters.

DRW

[Ed Dooley]

I was chairman of my small town’s selectboard in the late 80s-early 90s, and I got the town
it’s first computer (a Gateway 33mhz with a 40MB drive). The city manager of the next town (a big city of 2,000 people) tried to convince
me that we only needed a DOS based computer to run everything because his police, fire, water, tax departments,
and everything else was run from one computer with a 10MB (MB!) drive.
Ed

[Nate]

Back in ’89 when I purchased my first big gear 3/4″ edit suite, Betacam SP shoot, and my favorite 3D animation and graphic machine. I got the 3d animation /graphic machine , a Pinnacle 3000 which was a DOS 386 running Chrystal Graphics 3D (Topaz) and At&T TIPS Painter for a discounted demo price of $32K the salesman told me I would never need a Hard drive bigger than 100gig. And it was a big 100gig MFN hard drive.. That Pinnacle 3D with machine control sold a lot of work. That bleeding edge is always exspensive.