On Tue, September 2, 2008 14:31, William L. Maltby wrote:
On Tue, 2008-09-02 at 12:26 -0700, Scott Silva wrote:
<snip>
Can't argue with you :-) It does seem likely, as 1GB flash drives
wouldn't
have been a possibility at that time. I never owned one at all until relatively recently.
I remember when 1 GB *hard* drives didn't exist!
I swear, I'll never use a word like "curmudgeon" again! Sheesh!
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.
I got my first PC with a 20MB (Seagate ST-225) drive in 1985, they were fairly affordable by then. I don't think 5s were even still available in normal retail channels (a friend, slightly earlier, took some time looking for a 5 hoping to save some money over a 10MB that was so inconceivably big, more than he needed, but couldn't find one for sale). And that was a half-height 5.25" 20MB drive.
(Today, I couldn't fit two RAW photos from my current DSLR onto that drive. And that camera can shoot 5 frames a second and has a 19-shot internal buffer. And cost less than half what that first PC cost.)
I'm sure it was in the 80s still when I was using 30MB RLL drives.
Around 1992 I got a 40MB 5.25" full height drive in a new 386-based PC, and also my first laser printer.
By 1995 I had 3.5" 720MB drives in my PCs. In the earlier 90s I had purchased two 300MB drives, 5.25" half height (for $1500 each, sigh). Also by 1995 I had my first CD drive (not CD-R, though I went to a seminar at 3M and saw one; an external SCSI device that sold for only $15,000).
So I think you are lumping together too large a span of time to claim disk sizes were fairly stable over.