Thursday, August 03, 2006

Thanks to slashdot for reminding me I've worked with computers for far too long

Hattip: Slashdot
Today is the day of the 386, yesterday was the 286, Friday the 486 - which I guess means that Saturday somewhat appropriately is the day of the Pentium (586)

The fact that I can remember and tell you the configuration of each of the machines I had with each of those processors is kind of depressing (and sad in a whole other meaning).  Especially given that the 386 was the first one with a HDD, the only HDD I've had that never ran out of space. 

That's right that 20 MB was inexhaustible.
Tags: , , , , ,


2 comments:

Stephen said...

More numerology. Like 6/6/06.

Did you really have a 386, 486, 586, ...?

I skipped generations. 8088, 386, Pii, and now... Athlon. My Pii could do full screen real time video. I wouldn't have upgraded, but the disk controllers on the motherboard died. At some point, why upgrade?

My PC/xt had 20 MB of hard disk, but i added 30 MB for a total of 50 MB. It was difficult, but not impossible, to consume a 20 MB hard disk. The xt had CGA graphics, so images were awful, and therefore didn't consume the disk. Sound was non-exsistant. At the same time, i had a Mac II. The video was 640x480 8 bit color, and 24 bit color was available. The Mac II had good stereo sound out, and input was available. The Mac II was the machine on which QuickTime video was invented. Lots of reasons to fill a 40 MB hard disk. I still have my Mac II, but recently stopped using it.

These days, 160 GB fills pretty rapidly. Digital camera images and podcasts fill mine.

Unknown said...

No - went through the main sequence: 286, 386, 486, PI, PII, Athalon, AMD64.

The 286 had two HDD's - in the days when HDD was referring to High Density Drive rather than Hard disk :-)

The 386 was upgraded to have the 20MB HDD, and was the mixed beast with 3.5" and 5 1/4" that led to me still having many useless disks today :-{ Similarly my 386/xt was a CGA player, although Police Quest I was brilliant under that :-D

486/sx (never had the dx) stepped straight up to VGA, only witnessed the wonders of EGA on friends machines...

These days I've got twin 250GB drives, and yeah they're filling fast :-(

Might have to upgrade to one of those Sun storage servers with 250 TB :-D