Bill Campbell wrote:
Anyway, 5 and 10 MB HDs were the common PC drives back in the 80s and 90s. 20MB was a *big* one. Seek (average) of > 60ms was usual and fast ones were less than that.
The first HDs that Radio Shack sold for their Model 16s were 8in 8MB units and the primary HD which came with the disk controller sold for about $4,500.00.
Which makes an interesting contrast to the 8 GB micro-sd cards (about $45?) that a typical phone will take these days...
This was replaced with 5.25in 12MB drives in January 1983 at the same price, about the same time that the Model 16s were replaced by the Model 6000s (I learned Xenix on these boxes). If I remember correctly, Xenix came on 3 8in 1.2MB floppies plus another for the Development System which had things like the ``vi'' editor and *roff text processing tools.
Once upon a time, these were the biggest installed base of any unix-like system. I guess we had a lot of patience back then - and not much data.