Retro Scan of the Week: “10 Megabyte Hard Disk: $3,495”
May 1st, 2006 by Benj Edwards
Before you get excited about the low, low price for ~10,000,000 bytes of random-access magnetic data storage, make sure you read the fine print. Turns out the $3,495 price is for a refurbished unit only. The new 10 megabyte hard disk retails for a whopping $4,495. Oh, and there’s another catch: the price is in 1980 dollars (US). Adjusted to 2005 dollars, that comes to around $11,415.77. Ouch.
And this isn’t one of your 3.5″, half-height 5 1/4″ or even full-height 5 1/4″ hard drives either. No; it’s a hulking, old-school, non-Winchester jobbie that takes interchangeable disk cartridges.
I want one.
May 1st, 2006 at 7:34 am
Holy crap lol
May 1st, 2006 at 7:38 am
[…] Thanks RedWolf […]
May 1st, 2006 at 10:43 pm
Good thing you put the ‘humor’ tag on that one. That is funny. Really makes you appreciate the adoption of technology by the average person over the years, though.
May 2nd, 2006 at 6:16 pm
In 1985 Ampex came out with a Capricorn drive that sported 330Meg
of capacity in a small 90 pound Head disk assy, 16 inch platters and 1/3 horse 2400 rpm synchronous motor to spin it all up….I won’t even go into
the CDC RSD-80 or XMD-825 and how much fun they were.
May 3rd, 2006 at 10:48 am
Awesome. I use an old hard drive as an ottoman at home. It weighs well over 50lbs, is two feet high, and three feet across. I think it was about 10megs of storage, maybe 50.
Kids these days…
May 7th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
[…] That’s right, a 10MB hard disk for only $3,495 back in 1980 — and it’s refurbished to boot. A brand new unit would have cost you $4,495. If adjusted to 2005 dollars, that’s $11,415.77 (new)/$8876.11 (refurbished). View the full-sized advertisement here. And this isn’t one of your 3.5″, half-height 5 1/4″ or even full-height 5 1/4″ hard drives either. No; it’s a hulking, old-school, non-Winchester jobbie that takes interchangeable disk cartridges by gadgetsrss | posted in Weird, Computers Trackback URL | Comment RSS Feed Tag at del.icio.us | Incoming links […]
May 8th, 2006 at 3:23 pm
I love Vintage Computing and Gaming and it bugs me that other sites rip off stories without giving credit. I noticed a clone of this entry on OhGizmo! today which gave credit to TechEBlog who doesn’t give credit to VC&G. ARGH! If a newspaper ripped off a story from another newspaper everyone would freak out so why is it okay for other blogs to steal VC&G’s stories?
May 15th, 2006 at 12:32 pm
Yeah.. it’s a shame that people copy other people’s work without proper credit.
December 31st, 2007 at 5:52 pm
And to think that my 500-GB internal hard drive only cost $200 (about $100 back then).
http://www.techdreams.org/2007/11/10-mb-hard-disk-for-3398-3495-hard.html
Charles Babbage would probably turn in his grave if he saw the 10-MB hard drive, and the scientists at ENIAC that are dead now would probably turn in their graves if they saw computer nowadays.
April 25th, 2010 at 9:21 am
To think that I actually went to school to learn how to work on these things. Back in the 80’s if you had 2 of these chained together you had “mass” storage.
Along with a system that had 16K of memory, an 8 port serial adapter, 150 cps dot matrix printers, now you’re talking!
January 6th, 2017 at 11:37 am
Hey there just wanted to give you a quick heads up.
The words in your article seem to be running off the screen in Firefox.
I’m not sure if this is a format issue or something to do with browser compatibility but I figured I’d post to let you know.
The layout look great though! Hope you get the issue solved soon. Kudos