No, not Politically Correct Day, but rather, Personal Computer Day. On this date, 30 years ago, IBM released its very first PC, the 5150.
If you harbor warm feelings about the early days of personal computing, here's a reality check. The box of single-sided floppies pictured below (why I've kept the box, I have no idea) cost me 30 bucks. That's right, 30 bucks for 10 floppies. Which works out to what, $4000+ per gigabyte?
Mind you, you could double the capacity of each floppy by cutting an extra notch in the side and using the flip side — this was known as creating flippies. Most people did this by hand, but if you were really keen, you could buy a dedicated disk notcher. Now if I could only do that with my external hard drives.
Speaking of which, did you know that QNX was the first OS to support a PC hard drive? Read about it here.
I still have plenty of those for my Commodore 64. Most of them work just fine, despite they are from the previous millennium.
ReplyDeleteSome of my CD-R's, on the other hand, written in this millennium, kept dry and dark, show plenty of read failures today...
Not a comforting thought! What the world needs now is 10GB floppies! :-)
ReplyDeleteBring back the MicroDrive! :)
ReplyDelete