On Tue, 10 May 2005, Sam MacDonald wrote: > a few dozen gigs appeared... > > That was just funny (not the server issue) but the statement "a few > dozen gigs appeared" > > The days of a 286 running Coherent and a 40mb hard drive are just so > much history. I remember sitting in a classroom in 1987 and hearing that it wouldn't be long before we'd be talking about "gigabytes." I thought it was true, but it was still amazing to dream about it. Now we're talking about terabytes. Back in those days an older professor told me about his work in the 1960s on an old computer that needed an HDD. They were storing everything on cards. Reboots took a long time but were frequently needed. So they managed to convince the university (UW-Madison) to buy them an HDD. It was 1966 and the HDD cost $65,000. It held 2 MB and I think it was as big as a washing machine. It probably seemed like a lot of storage space at the time. I bought my first HDD in 1986. It cost me $450 and it held 30 MB because it was a true 20 MB drive with an RLL controller that added 50% to the volume. Back then 30 MB went a long, long way. You *could* still do your work on two 360 KB 5.25" floppies (e.g., WordPerfect 4.2 on one floppy and your data on the other), but it was beginning to get uncomfortable. This was before I had a "high density" floppy drive that held about 1.2 MB on a single 5.25" floppy - that was luxurious! Mike