Scholzpdx,
My father was involved in computers in the 1960's when they still ran on vacuum tubes, so computers were familiar things. In the early-70's we had a terminal at home that could access a mainframe (IBM 360) by setting a telephone receiver in a cradle. Sort of the pre-Internet. This was the first computer I ever used. It was magic to me a little kid Imagine in 1973, signing in on the big teletype-style keyboard that returns a "Good Morning [Insert your name here]. Shades of "War Games" What would like to do today. would you like to play a game?." The thing that made this even more magic was that I never saw the actual computer - it was "out there" somewhere- science fiction stuff. They sometimes ran a game to test the sign on. The IBM 360 ran off of tape drives and punch cards but later had one of the first disk drives. These used a stack of 18" platters and for 5MB, the cost was about $50,000. OK, here beginneth the frightening math: if 1MB = $10,000, 1GB = $10,000,000, and 1TB = (gulp) 10,000,000,000- ten Billion Dollars.
In the 70's I went to a demonstration of some early personal computers and particularly rememeber a Wang with about a an 8" monitor that ran programs off a cassette tape drive
So, from this third party contact, at some level I was used to computers as sort of normal things. Still, as computers cost $Millions then, the prognostication promising that someday a computer could fit in an ordinary room seemed far off.
And, for me it
was twenty years later.
In 1993 I was delivering a paper at a symposium in Italy and as this would be published, the paper was required to be submitted in Word. I had planned to buy a computer for business use. I was shocked at the cost of Apple systems that colleagues used- some had spent more than $8,000, so I looked at PC's. Eventually I settled on an IBM 486 DX2-50, that's a CPU running at 25MHz but that is doubled by the addition of a math coprocessor to 50MHz. For economy I did not jump to the fastest CPU then made, the 486 DX2-66. It looked like this:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/IBM-486DX2-66mhz-16mb-639mb-3-5-034-1-44mb-floppy-NIC-DOS-6-22-win-3-1-PC-/253159568196?hash=item3af17c7344:g:H7kAAOSwHZ1ZvvMP&nma=true&si=CTWeDZnUom7PMfL%2F9TgEn8tvcK4%3D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557
This system ran Windows 3.1 over DOS 6. It had the minimum 1MB of RAM and I bought the smallest drive, thinking it would take a very long time to fill- 85MB. with a 12" color monitor, the cost was about $2,.900. I purchased WordPerfect 6.1 which was the first WordPerfect with a WYSIWYG "Wizzywig" meant "What You See Is What You Get" : graphical interface I thought being able to select fonts was magic! Soon after I added and Corel Graphics- was it version X3?.and AutoCad 10 for DOS, which I think arrived on one or two 1.44MB floppy disk and cost something in the realm of $600.
Soon after using the system the system I realized that I would need more RAM and bought 2X 1MB modules for $340. That = $170 per MB, meaning that one GB at that price would cost $170,000. At that rate, the 64GB of RAM would have cost - take a deep breath here: $10,880,000. Also, the vast 85MB HD was filled in three months- realize that a WordPerfect Document could be 7K and an AutoCad drawing 100K- so I decided to buy the largest HD that Windows could recognize. Windows could see up to 528MB and the drives were listed as "540MB". That drive purchased was an IBM and it cost $570 or about $1.06 per MB. That means that the 4TB in my current system would cost - another deep breath - $42,400,000.
I used that system for 4+ years and in 1998 bought what I think of as my first really fast system, a Dell Dimension XPS T700R Pentium III 750MHz, having 768MB of RAM, an Ultra SCSI 66 controller- that's the fantastic rate of 66MB/s and this ran Windows 95. windows 95 was the worst OS- every few months it would lose the Registry structure. Windows 98 solved that and 98 led to the best MS OS- XP PRO 64-bit. I can't remember the original HD drive size- 2 or 4GB?, but it has 30GB and 80GB drives now. The T700R cost $2,400, an NEC 3V 15" color monitor was $550 and an Epson Actionlaser 300DPI printer was $750. I still have it with all the original documentation and disks. I couldn't sell it in 2010 for $100 and in 2012 could not even give it away.
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BzXtPxHilS63RVlBVnlTdk9ZV0U
The T700R was replaced by a 2004 Dell Dimension 8400 P4, then Dell Precision T5400, and etc.
It was interesting to see the early days of practical personal computers but I'm very glad to spend $200 on a HD and not $42,000,000.
BambiBoom