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System Storage for the Last 3 Decades - From Cassettes to Floppies to Ramdisks and Hard Drives.

Sometime around 1987 or so I was given my first DOS based computer. Up til then I had been using a TI-99/4A - arguably the best "home computer" on the market. This little computer was amazing--I actually figured out how to program on it. Regretably when I first started, the only way to save the project I had worked on was to send it to a cassette tape. Yes, a cassette tape.
It took a lifetime to save anything to cassette, as you might imagine. And you had to buy a new cassette for every project you wanted to save. It didn't matter though, that was all I knew so I couldn't complain. A year or two later I invested in a 5.25 inch floppy drive. My dreams had come true. The floppy drive was fast and it could hold more than one program at time. It was the best.
The TI didn't stick around long enough to take advantage of the greatness of the hard drive, but we did see a preview of what they might be like when some company invented a ramdisk for it. The ramdisk was similar to a hard drive, but everything was saved to RAM. It was lightning quick and could store vast amounts of data (of course "vast" is a relative term), but it could only store information while the computer was on. Once the power turned off, your files were gone. By the way, you can install a ramdisk on your computer today with software if you want some fast, temporary storage space.
Around 1987 a friend's father let me have his Olivetti portable (or or as they used to say - lug-able) computer. It came with a built-in hard drive--my first. It was a whopping 8 megabytes!
Since that time, hard drives have advanced a little bit. Today 8 meg wouldn't hold the smallest toolbar software. Today's hard drives are measured in gigabytes or even terabytes (1,000 gigabytes). For an old guy like me, the bigger these things get, the more it amazes me. If airplanes had advanced as much as hard drives since 1990, planes would probably hold 3,000 people and zip from coast to coast in about a minute and a half.
With hard drives storing so much data, and being so cost effective, the majority of people are adding new harddrives to their systems. And why not? It beats keeping a truckload of cassette tapes around.

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William B. Barnett has written about computers since 1984. He contributes regularly to www.maxtorharddrives.com

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