Seagate 3.5" 60TB SSD !
I remember having a 30MB full height 5.25" HDD in my IBM AT PC back in the 80's.
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My first was an Atari 400 with flat membrane keyboard and 16K of RAM.
I started teaching myself basic and decided to write a spreadsheet/DB/word processor.
It eventually hurt my fingers typing on the membrane keyboard. Replaced it with an aftermarket Inhome Software B Keyboard.
Hit the 16K limit before program was done. Bought a 48K RAM module which required soldering some jumpers on the motherboard.
Finished the program, and enjoyed. Wanted to get a floppy drive but parents couldn't afford it so used a 410 (crappy) tape drive, and upgraded to a 1010 (much improved) one. Had a 300 bps modem, and eventually a 1020 color plotter/printer which used narrow rolls of paper and 4 tiny pens. Eventually got a 1050 floppy drive, then eventually a couple of Indus GT units that were much faster and more capable. All of these plugged into the SIO port on the Atari. The guy that invented that tech used it as the basis to start the USB spec we all use today.
Got an ATR-8000 which had an Z-80 processor and ran CPM and plugged into the Atari to allow it to use any HDD, RS-232 devices, centronics-interface printers, and floppy drives.
Hooked up a Panasonic KX-P1180i dot-matrix printer that I bought when a local computer store placed a bulk order and got them dirt cheap. Later got a Panasonic laser printer when they did the same thing with them.
Got a Seagate ST-225 20 megabyte HDD from a guy I knew who worked for a repair shop. Some guy had the HDD repaired and never picked it up or paid for the repair. Cost me something around $150 I think. It could hold every program ever written for the Atari (including cartridge-based programs) and still have something like 18 megabytes left.
Upgraded to an Atari 130XE. It had 128K of memory. Got an ICD MIO board that gave it 512K of RAMdisk (which I later upgraded to 1 megabyte), and a standard HDD interface (MFM or RLL), as well as RS-232 and Centronics printer ports. Had light pens, light and sound sensors, a full-page scanner which worked by attaching to the head of a regular printer and moved back and forth across a page while line-feeding it up, and a Morse code decoder/encoder that I built from plans in Antic magazine. It worked best if you had a PLL filter, and could decode up to something like 40WPM. It connected to two of the 4 joystick ports, which on the Atari were both input and output devices.
Eventually sold all of that and used the money to buy a clone 286 with 40 megabytes of HDD space, a bunch of other stuff for it, and an Intel SatisFAXtion board which I used to turn into a career with Intel for a few years.
It's fun looking back.
I started teaching myself basic and decided to write a spreadsheet/DB/word processor.
It eventually hurt my fingers typing on the membrane keyboard. Replaced it with an aftermarket Inhome Software B Keyboard.
Hit the 16K limit before program was done. Bought a 48K RAM module which required soldering some jumpers on the motherboard.
Finished the program, and enjoyed. Wanted to get a floppy drive but parents couldn't afford it so used a 410 (crappy) tape drive, and upgraded to a 1010 (much improved) one. Had a 300 bps modem, and eventually a 1020 color plotter/printer which used narrow rolls of paper and 4 tiny pens. Eventually got a 1050 floppy drive, then eventually a couple of Indus GT units that were much faster and more capable. All of these plugged into the SIO port on the Atari. The guy that invented that tech used it as the basis to start the USB spec we all use today.
Got an ATR-8000 which had an Z-80 processor and ran CPM and plugged into the Atari to allow it to use any HDD, RS-232 devices, centronics-interface printers, and floppy drives.
Hooked up a Panasonic KX-P1180i dot-matrix printer that I bought when a local computer store placed a bulk order and got them dirt cheap. Later got a Panasonic laser printer when they did the same thing with them.
Got a Seagate ST-225 20 megabyte HDD from a guy I knew who worked for a repair shop. Some guy had the HDD repaired and never picked it up or paid for the repair. Cost me something around $150 I think. It could hold every program ever written for the Atari (including cartridge-based programs) and still have something like 18 megabytes left.
Upgraded to an Atari 130XE. It had 128K of memory. Got an ICD MIO board that gave it 512K of RAMdisk (which I later upgraded to 1 megabyte), and a standard HDD interface (MFM or RLL), as well as RS-232 and Centronics printer ports. Had light pens, light and sound sensors, a full-page scanner which worked by attaching to the head of a regular printer and moved back and forth across a page while line-feeding it up, and a Morse code decoder/encoder that I built from plans in Antic magazine. It worked best if you had a PLL filter, and could decode up to something like 40WPM. It connected to two of the 4 joystick ports, which on the Atari were both input and output devices.
Eventually sold all of that and used the money to buy a clone 286 with 40 megabytes of HDD space, a bunch of other stuff for it, and an Intel SatisFAXtion board which I used to turn into a career with Intel for a few years.
It's fun looking back.
