I.T. will never cease to amaze me. My first Hard-Drive was a 120 MB 5 1/4" drive (the biggest, meanest, fastest HDD of it's time) on a Compaq 386; the HDD alone was a 2.500 USD optional....

so.. roughly 21.000 USD / GByte

compared to about 4 bucks per gigabite on today's WD HDD's...

hmm.. that's a 5,250 times cheaper...

.. and to think the difference will just keep getting bigger...

120 MB hard drive? My first hard drive was 10 MB and I probably paid a couple of hundred bucks for it back in the mid-80's.

Probably an IBM 8086-processor PC? I heard the first HDD's on the IBM PC's were 10MB. I only joined the PC-world in late 1987 with the Compaq 386.

What HD in the mid-80's?
I was happy to have a floppy drive.

I've got you all beat. I've used punch cards.

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Wake up every day that would be a start.

I agree. My first Computer was a Radio Shack TRS 80 in 1979 with 2 floppy disks of 80k each. The amazing things is that the entire operating system (named LDOS) took only 75k

Somehow I had a feeling we'd get down to card-punchers on this thread. Must have been a riot !

Hope we don't go all the way to abacus-users !!

I have used punch cards too during my last years of high school. We had to put our programs (500 to 3000 of punch cards) in a drawer in the afternoon to get them compiled during the night and get the results back the next day. You can imagine how long it tooks us to debug a program. You learn to be very efficient in writing bug free code . When I went to college I was amazed that I could actually use a terminal to enter my programs and get them compiled right away.

My college installed DEC VT102 terminals the summer before my freshman year, so I missed the punch cards by 1 semester.... lucky me

I do remember buying 2GB HD's in '95 for $2k-$3k each....