And you thought hard drive prices were high!

*PFFFTTTT*

Check out this historical look at prices:

Quote:

---

Small sample taken from link above

1956 IBM 5 megabytes USD$50,000 USD$10,000/MB

1981 Apple 5 megabytes USD$3500 USD$700/MB

1988 Unknown Manufacturer 20 megabytes USD$799 USD$40/MB

1988 Unknown Manufacturer 250 megabytes USD$3995 USD$16/MB

1995 Seagate 2.1 gigabytes USD$1699 USD81¢/MB (this is the year I paid for my own computer with my own money -- Quadra 650)

1998 Quantum 6.4 gigabytes USD$479.99 USD8.63¢/MB

2004 Western Digital Caviar SE (7200rpm) 250 GB USD$249.99 USD$1./GB

---

Maybe that new drive ain't that expensive after all, eh? :D

http://www.antionline.com/showthread...hreadid=260786


For pics of some of them.

http://oldcomputers.net/ads/ads.shtml

Heh.. and what's scary is that some of those old drives might fetch near the same price today for collectors (historical value)... Might even be able to get your money back at some point..

I know an original Mac sold for 5 or 6 figures at some point.

BTW, those links don't work. :(

I know I just checked them so I edited the post. They must have moved them, I'm looking now but I gave a link to the page they were on.

Holy crap! At a buck a gig, I can afford .17 Gigs right now! woo!

I wonder price what my original suitcase compaq PC would fetch? Time to call Antiques Roadshow...

[edit]Figured I'd edit this in so I don't appear *too* much the post whore -

I can picture an "Antique Computers Collector's Club" in my head, and the little voices of my imagination sound off saying things like "And here we see Joe, driving a VERY flashy TRS 80 with 1 megabyte of onboard ram and a cassette player drive!" and "Doesn't Sarah look sweet with her Apple complete with restored original wooden case valued at $250,000!" and "Here comes Jim with his high-style generic PC with custom 8.5inch floppy drives!"

Hell, I bet even Leno the collector would want a piece of this - and I bet he'll start auctioning them off after they're signed by all his celebrity guests, but only to benefit worthy charities... :rolleyes:

And STILL the old PS2 will sit as a doorstop.[/edit]

Ha! I've got huge BOXES of old hard drives and old hardware... maybe its time to start putting some of it up for auction. :)

Anyone want to bid on a first generation touch screen monitor? Complete with the ISA controller card...

Quote:

---

Anyone want to bid on a first generation touch screen monitor? Complete with the ISA controller card...

---

Noooooo..........But it would be interesting to run something like Encase on you box of Hdds. Lol

Remember when 4MB of memory...took 2 floors of an office building (late 70s) :D

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by jinxy
Noooooo..........But it would be interesting to run something like Encase on you box of Hdds. Lol

---

Right... which is exactly why they are in big boxes in the basement... behind locked doors in locked cabinets. lol... its about time to get the shotgun and have some fun!

Quote:

---

Originally posted here by morganlefay
Remember when 4MB of memory...took 2 floors of an office building (late 70s) :D

---

No I wasn't born yet. But I do know that was a time when you could cause a core dump with a can of coke and a hammer. And what about spinning full sized length HDs? A few places here still had these sadly and I guess one guy learned to watch his head near the disk spinning because it planted him in the wall 10 feet away.

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?

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.

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.