Quote:
Originally Posted by geekmaster
And being a "bleeding edge" tech collector, I spent many hundreds of dollars years back on a first-generation USB flash stick, a full 128KB (kilobytes) and it still took over an hour to fill it -- USB 2.0 was not invented yet, and USB was originally meant for slow things like mice and keyboards...
But then again, I still have 5MB hard drives in my collection (which hold the equivalent of about THREE IBM floppy disks), and they only moved the read heads (via stepper motors) at TEN steps per second (just like really old floppy drives). It took several seconds to seek from an inner to an outer cylinder. And we thought that was amazingly FAST back then (when most of our code was stored on boxes full of audio cassette tapes).
|
You certainly bring back the memories! The first computer system I worked on at Drexel was a LINC-8 with 4K of core, dual DEC tapes a teletype console and a 32K Winchester hard drive. We each customized a DEC tape to use, usually having it fail to boot if the switch registers were not set as we desired.
The LINC-8 had both a PDP-8 mode and a LINC-8 mode, one twos complement and the other ones complement. There was a speaker hooked to one bit of one of the LINC registers, so one thing I programmed was a music interpreter taking advantage of it.
I also had access to an APL\360 system, which transitioned to an APL/SV system, via a 2741 with an APL element.
Thanks for the memories.
Dave