Hard drive usage in the 80's and 90's?

[a8isa1]

A harddisk back in the days?

I don't know a single person who owned

a harddisk back in the days for their

8 bit.

My own first harddrive was a 40 MB inside

my Amiga 2000 in 1988.

 

Stefan

You didn't know anyone in 1982 who could pony up at least $3195 USD for one of the Corvus Drives?

 

Shocking!

Edited April 10, 2019 by a8isa1

[bbking67]

My school used a Corvus with a multiplexer (for Apple II) in 1982. I think that's a more realistic use case. Not many Atari users were going to have one of these systems.

[ricortes]

Our history was always tied to the Intel platform IMO. Specifically the early interfaces were SCSI but scuzzy drives were expensive. Then along came IBM and the clones so the price of MFM drives got down to the price of a used car and we could afford them. At the time SCSI was arguably better then MFM, but the MFM drives like the Seagate et al could be bought along with SCSI to MFM controller for less then the cost of a SCSI drive alone so most people went that route. You kind of have to remember the history of hard drives on the Atari also included things like the Adaptec ACB controller. I think DTC or one of the other outfits made one that worked too. I still have an Adaptec controller laying around somewhere but the only MFM drive I have left that still works is an IBM 10 meg, everything else has bit the dust in noisy heartbreaking crashes.

 

The SIO2PC stuff didn't happen until the 90's. There was the SIO2CPM before that in the 80s but the only one I know that had one going is Kyle.

[Alfred]

I worked in mainframe support from the mid 80s through 2000 with a few gaps.

 

Fairly sure my first PC experience with a HDD was around 1987-8 with the old Winchester 5.25" mechs and a whopping 20 Meg.

I remember even around 1998 the machine on my desk only had a 2 Gig drive though it was underpowered compared to even a midrange home machine.

 

As for the mainframes, before they started using the 5.25" PC-like drives in huge RAID arrays there were the 3350, 3380 and 3390s.

 

3350 usually in a pair and about the same size as 2 medium washing machines side by side with a capacity a bit over 300 Meg each.

 

3380 usually in a box of 4, about the size of a big double fridge. Volume size varied depending on model from about 800 Meg to 3.8 Gig each.

 

3390 was the last of the SLEDs (Single Large Expensive Disk) with volume size around 1.9 to 11.3 Gig depending on model.

 

 

 

Thread hijack. Hey, a fellow S/370er. I was in DASD support in the early eighties. Did you guys have those pos CDC 3350's ? I remember coming in one weekend to initialize replacements, they did 26 HDA's in a weekend. Man those things were junk. Did you guys have a 3851 MSS ? Fun times hand-threading those stupid cartrdiegs in the DRD, or the joys of 3330-11 staging failures, eh ? I still have a couple of the carts, I use em as pencil holders, heh.

 

Or the water-cooled 3033 with a 3051 AP. We used to get in sh!t all the time for putting it on city water cuz the chiller system was broken down more often than not, and the idea of 26/gallons a minute going down the drain made the facilities guy crazy, haha. Lots of good memories from those days. Not so much with z/Arch and those stupid encryption cards for SSL.

[zzip]

A hard disk in the 80s was like a 10Mb SHOEBOX-sized device for $700

 

10MB was equivalent to a small stack of floppy disks. Sure the speed would be nice, but it cost much more than the damn computer! Most of us just couldn't justify that and learned to deal with swapping floppies constantly.

 

It took a few years for them to get smaller in size, larger in capacity, and more affordable. By the 90s they were ubiquitious

[Geister]

I was given a 256K MIO by ICD for demoing their unit at the Atari Expo in Allentown, PA in 1985. They had sent along a Hollywood block sized 5 MB hard disk that was supposed to demo how easy it was to hook up a hard disk to the MIO. I wanted to do a real demonstration of setting up a hard drive, so I walked over to a vendor's table and plunked down $250. for a 20 MB hard drive in a grey housing that was supposed to be part of a kit for an ST. The vendor took my money and told me I was wasting my time because it wasn't designed to work on an 8bit and in fact was an MFM interface, not SCSI.

 

I took the drive back to my table and unplugged the 5 MB brick and plugged in the ribbon cable from the MIO. When I turned everything on, the drive spun up and the SpartaDos partition program accepted the heads and cylinder information and the next thing I knew I was formatting a 20 MB ST drive with my 8-bit computer. I spent the rest of the show telling people about how I was able to buy a hard drive at the show and have it working before the show was over. I demoed copying files to and from the hard drive and to show the speed of the interface, I copied as many picture files as I could get my hands on to the hard drive and then ran a slide show loading them into the computer as fast as it could.

 

A vendor nearby was demoing a slide show package on an ST and was joking that even with a hard drive and smaller picture files the poor little 8-bit couldn't keep up with the ST. Just to mess with him, I moved most of the picture files to the MIO's ram disk and started flipping them up on the screen so fast that his jaw dropped. I told him i had previously been slowing down the load so people could see the pictures. I wonder if he ever figured out how I did that?

[bbking67]

Well $250 for a hard drive is 1985 would have been a steal. Im sure I paid way more in 1987 when I bought my MIO.

[ryanr256]

In the late 90s I had an ATR-8000 that had 2 SCSI hard drives attached. I don't remember how I acquired it and I ended up selling it (which I kinda regret). The drives were housed in a modified case and sounded like a jet engine when they spun up. I think there was an Adaptec 4000a controller involved with the ATR.

 

 

-Bob

[+slx]

It was a self created format. The Interface was built upon a tutorial in a German Computer Magazine.

The software was a self development. A little Assembler and Turbo Basic for the creating tools.

It was really interesting to play around with Sector lengths . Loading a boot file in one block, or reducing the blocks to 32Bytes, just for direct communications between the computers. That was back in 1987-88 ...

 

The interface was homebuilt and I remember typing in some software for the ST side which actually worked after some troubleshooting, allowing me to transfer data from the Atari to the ST, so some of my address book data has migrated from 800 to ST to PC to PC to Mac to Mac....

 

Got my first 40MB 5,25" HD with an ST and that was still considered luxurious then, most other people had only floppies. I remember sending off a postal order for about a month worth of wages to Germany and then anxiously waiting (and angrily phoning) the guy I sent it to to send me a combo 240MB/44MB Syquest HD.

 

I certainly knew no one who used a HD with his 800/800XL and I don't think such stuff ever made it over the pond. I only ever saw an ATR8000 when I took part in a student exchange program and was extremely happy to have an Atari-equipped guest family (who drove me at least half an hour to Nashua, NH to buy some disks off a guy who apparently worked there and sold them from his garage).