DVD and Spectrums

Once upon a long ago I had a Sinclair ZX spectrum with all of 16 Kilo Bytes of RAM. Today finding a file smaller than 16KB on my 120GB hard disk is a tough ask.

What set me off on this bout of reminiscing was my acquistion of a DVD writer. I used to have a CD ROM before many other geeks and the same pattern was followed for a CD writer. But when it comes to reading or writing DVDs I have been lagging behind. So when I went to the retailer to pick up a new hard drive (after the annual crash), decided to pick up a DVD writer as well.

It's double layer so it can burn upto 8 GB on a single disk. Less than 5 years ago I had a hard disk of the same size. Now I have three hard disks totaling 200GB. My first hard drive on the other hand was a mere 10MB. My first computer didn't have any disks at all. You had to save all the data on a cassete tape (rembers those audio cassete tapes?)

The 8086 I had long ago (the first member of the Pentium series) had a 360kb floppy drive. In fact it had two of them. The first was for the program disk the second for the data disk. It had all of 640Kb of memory. Geeks with only one

drive used to create a RAM disk for holding the program disk.

The next machine I had if I remember correctly was a 386 with 8MB of ram and the 10 MB hard drive. From that I graduated to a Pentium 133Mhz with 180MB and 16 MB ram which was later upgraded to 32MB. To this machine I later added a CDROM and an 2GB hard disk.

From there it was to a K6-II followed by a K6-III the memory jumped all the way upto 128MB and the hard drive went upto 8GB. Then I started working and picked up an AMD athlon 700MHz, Memory doubled to 256MB and in between I picked up two drives one of 10 GB and other the 20GB. The 20GB was retired only recently it was serving as a third drive purely for backup purposes.

The next machine was a total disaster an Athlon XP with a totally messed up mother board. It killed off one of my hard drives too. From there I moved to the current machine which is a P4 2Ghz. In I upgraded the RAM to 1GB. That's nearly 1500 times as much as I used to have on my 8086.