Wednesday, February 07, 2007

My First Computer Had 64K Of RAM And Stored Its Data On A Tape Recorder.

So, today I bought a 1 GB USB flash drive for $14.49. One gigabyte of data, in my pocket, for less than fifteen bucks.

Damn, but living in the 21st century is cool.

15 comments:

  1. I remember it well. We could not make a sound while you were taping Star Trek. I actually used it to keep my bowling stats. Tandy CoCo.

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  2. Where did you get such a great deal?

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  3. Amazon has them on sale. Check out the link in the post.

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  4. I only had 48K on my Spectrum. That was 1982, so sometime this year will be my silver jubilee.

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  5. You paid $14.49 for your flash drive? As I type this, that Amazon link is currently selling it for only $6.79! You wuz robbed, Betty!

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  6. Where? It doesn't say that for me! Well, it looks like they've got used ones available for $6.58...

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  7. My first computer had 48K of RAM and I had that tape drive thingie too except if I ever knocked the volume knob, I could never get the damn data back. Was a bitch. Just FYI, it was an Apple II+

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  8. Ours used to glitch, all the time. You'd start to read the data, and it'd give you an error, and you'd have to rewind and try it again... and again... And eventually the tape would wear out, and you'd just be screwed. I remember how impressed and relieved we were when we finally got a disk drive. A huge, external, 5 1/4" floppy drive that *also* got lots of errors...

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  9. That disc drive cost 278$ when bought it at Radio Shack. That was about 1981.

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  10. Wow, no wonder it took you so long to buy it for us. :)

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  11. Man, we have sooooooo many flash drives in our lost and found...

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  12. Wow...I remember our TRS80 Coco 1 had a whipping 16 K of memory. We ugraded to 64K for around $600. My brother used to save his assignments on cassette...and they were always somewhat garbled.
    It's crazy to think 1GB in a zip drive for that cheap. I remember my university PC had 4GB hard drive and I thought-wow-I'll never fill THAT up! :)

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  13. Heh. At work, we archive files of astronomical data onto 2 GB DAT tapes, and very often when there's only about 30-50 MB left on the tape we'll just mark 'em full. And every so often, I'll stop and marvel at the fact that what would once have seemed like tons of storage space is now close considered close enough to zero to ignore. :)

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  14. Oh I also remember we had a tape with card games for the Tandy and like you could easily view and edit the code and I used to mess with it and make the cards come up garbled and stuff. The good ole days!

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  15. Whoops, typo correction: those are 12 GB tapes.

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