• AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The first computer I ever used didn’t have a hard drive (Macintosh 128k). The first hand me down computer I had in my room was a 286 with a 500mb HDD.

      I vaguely remember that one evening my father drilled into me that if I get a dialogue box with the text [Disk Read Error, (Abort) (Retry) (Initialize)?] That Initialize was never the correct option. Apparently I deleted one of his projects by mistake. I was 5 or 6 at the time

      • PersnickityPenguin@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I think my first harddrive was smaller than that, and we had to compress it to get double the space. However, everything ran 4x slower.

    • jimbo@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I remember watching ZDTV/TechTV in the 90s and Leo Laporte referring to an 8GB drive as “an entire universe in there”.

    • Underwaterbob@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      My buddy’s first HDD for his Amiga held 20mb. It was the size of a toaster, and cost something like $400. Now, a chip the size of my fingernail can hold a terabyte, and costs less than that HDD. I know it’s slowed down a lot, but I really wonder where we’ll be in another forty years.

    • CADmonkey@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      My first computer was a Coleco/ADAM with a tape drive.

      My first “IBM Compatible” computer was a 286 with a 40 MB hard drive. It also had a CD-ROM which at the time was this whole huge futuristic thing. We had an entire encyclopedia on a CD! They could hold hundreds of megabytes! More storage than I could ever need!

      I have a camera drone with a 128 gigabyte micro SD card in it. The card is smaller than my fingernail. I freely admit that having that much storage on something so small just doesn’t add up in my brain. I know its possible, it works, I’m just someone who grew up dealing with megabytes being something that took up a lot of physical space and now something a few orders of magnitude larger could get lost in my pocket.