Down the memory lane
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Few days back, I happened to stumble upon a post in a forum where the question poster had asked for guidance on the computer model and configuration he should go for, and whether he should wait for upcoming better configurations.
All the answers to the question mentioned one or the other configuration. For the part "should wait or not" most gave the standard analogy "it's like getting married and later regretting that you could have gotten a better model only if you had waited a little more"...
... one of the answerer added "my first computer had a meagre 2 GB hard disk"... He then reiterated "mind you, that's 2 GB hard disk and not RAM..." This closing remark just blew me, for it made me go down the memory lane..
Just 2 GB hard disk? The first computer that my father bought for me way back in 1997, a Pentium 133 MHz system had a whooping 1 GB hard disk...
A 386 DX computer that my cousin bought in 1995 had 240 MB hard disk. This was the very computer on which I had my first GUI experience on Windows 3.1. I still smile when I think of the cat (application) that ran every where the mouse cursor went.
Two PC XT systems that were available in the computerdrome, at the institute where I attended my honours diploma in 1994, had respectively 20 MB and 40 MB hard disks. These computers had DOS as the operating system and were apt for dBase III+ and COBOL that were the primary softwares that we were to work on, in our first semester. Low hard disk size made it largely unsuitable for installation of Windows 3.1 whose standard installation required 11 to 13 MB hard disk space.
And hard to forget, the BBC Microcomputer that was the first computer I learnt working on, in 1987, had no hard disks. The operating system as well as the application softwares resided on ROM chips and optional floppy disk drives could be used to store programs you wrote. Did I mention the RAM size? I guess I didn't and it was 32 KB and was huge considering that there was a smaller model in the market that only had16 KB.
30 years.. I guess, they went by so fast..
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