New old idea

[kengr]

Some of you are no doubt aware of the solid state Hard Drives on the market.

Thing is, this isn't a new idea. While chatting with xander_opal I remembered the old SemiDisks that someone local made and sold in the early 80s.

Here's an ad a 1983 Infoworld

Comments

[brockulfsen.livejournal.com]

I recall Solid State drives for the PDP11 in the late-70s. Some were as big as 64k-words. Cost an arm and a leg. There were also stand alone solid state drives that could be shared by several machines, like a network drive.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Shiny! But, at $3000 for a megabyte, I'll just keep swapping floppy disks back and forth.

But then, I was a cheap kid. I still remember how to make flippies.

[kengr]

Think back on what Hard drives cost back then. I still recall prices like $8k for a 10 meg drive.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Somewhere I've still got a Radio Shack catalog from that era. If memory serves, you could get either a 5MB drive for $2500 or a 10MB drive for $5000. High tech and no bigger than your stereo's turntable. *grin*

Of course, by the time anyone I knew actually got a hard drive the state of the art had progressed and it held a vast 30MB, as much as a large drawer of diskettes.

(Strangely, the vast mess of insufficiently labeled diskettes in my life did not go away until many years later.)

[kengr]

I've got a shelf full of 5.25" floppies that I have to sort thru now that I have the required computers dug out of storage. Finding room to set them up so I can transfer files will be a project one of these days.

Then I've got the (small) box (several shoeboxes worth) of 3.5" floppies that got damp. To retrieve the data (mostly graphics files) off them will require carefully applying a couple dots of superglue to get the media reattached to the hub.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

I have archives I haven't seen in more years than I care to think about. I rather wonder what might be buried in a box in the attic somewhere...