Thread: WOW 10Mb Hard Drive $3398.00

I had a first gen CD writer SCSI Bus
First gen DVD burner
DAT drive
Zip drive

Insane prices back then.

I was working on IBM 370/135 mainframes in the mid/late 70’s and one K of memory was around USD$2k back then.


IBM System/370 Model 135 - Wikipedia

Arrrr the good ol’days!!

Cheers - Simon

Scary how cheap tech has got relative to other things.
We bought our first home in 1988 & in the same year bought a PC + 3 axis A4 plotter for the business. The PC + plotter cost a quarter of the price of the house.

Memory might be cheap these days but, at my age, it's not easy!

My intro to computers in Feb '70 was on a near-new 16K byte IBM 360/30 which was later expanded to 32K. I still recall seeing the 2 wires that passed through each ferrite core (1 bit) to write and read its polarity, representing 0 or 1.

Edit: The memory isn't working too well - my intro to computers was in 1969 using a hand punch to produce cards to program the uni's computer in Fortran but I have no memory of what computer that was.

Still have my operating manual for an ICL 1904A mainframe. 96K of core running the George 3 (GEneral ORGanisational Environment) OS, a 24 bit operating system. $450k at installation in Dec 1970 + $150k of peripherals.

Undergraduate jobs (Fortran IV on punched cards) were restricted to use 18K only. If you were really organised you could squeeze in maybe 2 compilations of your code per day. Debugging syntax and logic errors therefore usually took days before you got something that would execute correctly.

That brings back memories starting to convert from IBM's 16 bit to ICL 1900's 24 bit 6 years later but avoided when I changed jobs to work closer to my new abode.

When I was working for one of Australia's largest companies in the mid seventies, we needed more memory in our division's only computer. I can't remember the dollar amount, but I do remember that an additional 256k of memory was so expensive it had to go to the company board.