On 5/10/05, Mike Miller <mbmiller at taxa.epi.umn.edu> wrote: > 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 worked with a guy that came from Control Data. He said a co-worker used a discarded HD platter and made it into a table.