Home | Computer
Sometime around 1987 or so I got my first "real" computer. Prior to that I had been using a TI-99/4A - arguably the best "home computer" on the market. This personal computer was incredible--I actually learned to program on it. Unfortunately when I first started, the only way to save a file I had worked on was to send it to a cassette tape. Yes, a cassette tape. It took forever to save anything to cassette, as you might imagine. And you had to use a new cassette for every project you wanted to save. It didn't matter though, I was pretty naive and didn't know better so I couldn't complain. A year or two later I invested in a 5.25 inch floppy drive. Now I was really cooking!I couldn't believe the difference. The floppy drive was speedy and it could hold more than one program at time. It was the cat's meow. The TI didn't hold out long enough to enjoy the greatness of the hard drive, but we did see a preview of what they might be like when someone invented a ramdisk for it. The ramdisk was almost like a hard drive, but everything was saved to RAM. It was lightning fast and could store vast amounts of data (of course "vast" is a relative term), but it could only store information while it was powered up. Once the power went off, your files were gone. Incidentally, you can add a ramdisk on your computer today with software if you want some fast, temporary storage space. Around 1987 a friend's father decided to give me his Olivetti portable (or or as they used to say - lug-able) computer. It came with a built-in hard drive--my first. It was a whopping 8 megabytes! Since then, hard drives have advanced a lot. Today 8 meg wouldn't hold the smallest toolbar software. Today's hard drives are measured in gigabytes or even terabytes (1,000 gigabytes). For someone like me, the bigger these things get, the more amazed I am. If airplanes had advanced as much as hard drives since 1990, planes would probably hold the entire population of Rhode Island and speed from ocean to ocean in about the time it took to write this article. With hard drives storing so much data, and being so inexpensive, many people are adding extra harddrives to their systems. And why not? It beats keeping a truckload of cassette tapes around.
Article Source: http://epicenterbusiness.com
Robert E. Frehse has written about computers since 1984. He contributes regularly to www.maxtorharddrives.com
Please Rate this Article
5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5
Not yet Rated
