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System Storage From the 80's to Now - From Cassettes to Floppies to Ramdisks and Hard Drives

By: The Harddriver

Sometime around 1987 or so I got my first 'real' computer. Before then I had been using a TI-99/4A--arguably the best 'home computer' available. This machine was fabulous--I actually discovered how to program on it. Regrettably when I first started, the only way to save a program I had worked on was to send it to a cassette tape. You bet, a cassette tape.

It took a long, long time to save anything to cassette, as you might imagine. And you had to buy a new cassette for every file 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. What a godsend. The floppy drive was quick and it could store more than one program at time. It was the cat's meow.

The TI didn't hold out long enough to experience the greatness of the hard drive, but we did get a glimpse of what they might be like when some company invented a ramdisk for the TI. The ramdisk was sort of like a hard drive, but all the information was saved to Random Access Memory.

It was lightning quick and could store vast amounts of data (of course "vast" is a relative term), but it could only store files while the computer was on. If the power turned off, your files were gone. By the way, you can install a ramdisk on your computer today with software if you want some speedy, temporary storage space.

Around 1987 a friend's father let me have 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 little bit. 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 an old guy 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 a small country and zip from ocean to ocean in about the time it took to write this article.

With hard drives storing so much data and being so cost effective, many people are adding extra hard drives to their systems. And why not? It beats keeping a truckload of cassette tapes around.

Article Source: http://bytepowered.org/articles

Terry Cowell has written about computers since 1984. He contributes regularly to www.maxtorharddrives.com

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