30 May
2023
30 May
'23
6:09 p.m.
On May 30, 2023, at 1:22 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
In 1981 when i got my first 5MB hard disk drive at work (I had to write the drivers for
the OS myself) I was able to put all or my source code, binaries, executable, applications
and the operating system and not fill half of that disk.
A single .raw file from my camera can be over 20MB now.
Is technology advancing us or just helping us to create more and more storage needs 😁?
Yes.
We used to call that the "virtual disease" in honor of the fact that VMS
applications tended to be 5x or 10x the size of PDP-11 applications that do similar
things. As a result, developing for both by wring it for VMS and then backporting to
PDP-11 tended to give terminally bad performance, while going the other way worked quite
well. ("KOALA" which I'm not sure ever shipped, comes to mind as an example
of the former.)
Disk drive growth is pretty amazing. My first hard drive was 256 kB (an RC-11, on the
college physics department PDP-11/20 in 1973). Amd even the big hard drives on the main
timesharing system weren't that much bigger (2.4 MB each, a pair of RK05s).
paul