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I can remember when 'spinning up a hard drive' was a 2 hour process - fetching the disk (drum?) from the storage cabinet, 2 men manually carrying it to the drive mount (because the bloody thing weighed about 50lbs), sticking it in, bringing the unit online for spinup, then waiting on the motor to turn the monstrosity up to speed. I can remember when all this took place in a 'clean room' with nice men wearing spectacularly white shirts ensuring no dust particle went unabated in addtion to their normal duties with tapes, disks (again, drums?), and punched cards.
I actually saw a fortran program (written by my Father in a course he took back in the early 1970's) in the form of a 6 inch thick stack of punched cards. The resultant printout was a whopping 16 lines of output on that 4ft wide green and white tractor paper.
I can remember writing (my sophomore year in HS) in spaghetti basic a little graphics program that took up the entire memory of the TRaSh 80 I owned (1 meg resident) - it was a hoot-owl based on one of my Mother's cross-stitch patterns, that randomly blinked, opened his beak and hooted (yes, sound!). (wow! multimedia in 1984!) I even used a for/next to make the sound lower in pitch and sound like a real hoot... I was kinda proud of that lil proggie - can ya tell?
I still wonder whatever happened to my old TRS. It think mum threw it out when she bought her first PC, long after I'd gone into the Navy. I wonder what it'd fetch now too?
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How about a dollar to not mention you owned one? ;)
My first computer.... I'm typing this message on now. 5 years and still chugging away.
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Plus "spinning up" also meant waiting for the air pressure to build up inside the disk chamber. External air compressors like vacum cleaners, sucked out all the dust and provided an air cushion for the heads to ride (seek) on. F that, I like today. Rebooting takes a few minutes verus 45 minutes.
