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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

> 20MB was quite a lot of space in the eighties!

Yes it was! I remember in 86/87, when I upgraded my original IBM PC from having two 5.25" floppies to having one floppy and a 40MB hard drive. All of a sudden my word processor, with 11 floppies, could be loaded on the drive and I didn't have to switch disks to spell check and it opened in seconds instead of minutes!

Back then the upgrade from two floppies to one floppy and a hard disk was way bigger than going from spinning disk to SSD (and that was a huge jump too)

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All of a sudden my word processor, with 11 floppies, could be loaded on the drive and I didn't have to switch disks to spell check and it opened in seconds instead of minutes!

My sister and I would put a cassette tape into an original Sony cassette player/recorder hooked up to an Apple II+ and wait 30 minutes for "Little Brick Out" (Breakout clone) to load up so we could play.

A few years ago I had my mind slightly boggled when I realised that the new computer I'd just bought had exactly one million times as much storage as the first computer I ever owned (Amiga 500 with 5 MB -> Mac Pro with 5 TB).

My first computer had 4K RAM, 4K ROM BASIC (TRS-80 Model I). Your Amiga (and mine) seemed like a spaceship next to that Model I.

For me the biggest jump was from cassette tape to floppies. Before that I hacked a Sony cassette recorder to give me something resembling random access but the floppy drive (all 160 K of it...) really made a huge difference.

What did you do to it? Turn it into a DECtape?

The Sony recorder had a way to activate the mechanisms electronically, so small step to hook up the optical gate of the tape counter to an interrupt pin and the buttons to output bits. That way you could address the tape roughly by the block (toggle the 'play' or 'record' button bit when the counter hit a certain point).

This was the deck:

https://www.google.com/search?q=sony+tc+fx+410

The storage capacity was horrible, but it did work after a fashion.

I just checked out the wikipedia entry on the DECtape, yes, that was pretty much it, only much much slower and not as nicely integrated.

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