EricBall's Tech Projects

The size of these files is mind boggling to someone who started on 64k computers and 20MB hard drives.

wow, so much room! my first computer had 5K RAM and a tape drive

The size of these files is mind boggling to someone who started on 64k computers and 20MB hard drives.

wow, so much room! my first computer had 5K RAM and a tape drive

The first computer I played with was the Apple ][+, which I think topped out at 48K. My first computer was a 32K CoCo which was later upgraded to 64K. The Apple ][+ (and the Compaq my Dad occasionally brough home from work) used floppy disks. The CoCo, however, used cassette tapes.The 20MB hard drive didn't come until much later. In university I helped a friend back up his 20MB hard disk to a huge number of 360KB floppies. Nowdays the only sane way to back up a hard drive is to another hard drive.

My first computer was the 130XE, which had ~128K RAM and used...hm. I cannot remember how much room is on a 5.25" floppy that the 1050 reads. Anyway, not much. Times are different!

 

The crazy thing is how fast things are still changing. I bought a 128 MB flash drive about 5 years ago, on sale for $6; it was small for the time. Now I see ads for 4 GB flash drives for the same price! I grew up with fast technology change (born in 1977) and I'm still amazed that for the same, nominal price, you can get 30x as much memory as you did just a few years ago, in the same tiny form factor.

My first computer was the 130XE, which had ~128K RAM and used...hm. I cannot remember how much room is on a 5.25" floppy that the 1050 reads. Anyway, not much. Times are different!

In Enhanced Density mode the 1050 could store 128K per side. (40 tracks, 26 sectors per track, 128 bytes per sector)