30/30 Winchester

from my mental archives

[lawman]

A random thought crossed my mind - anyone remember when hard drives were called "winchesters"? If you had to ask how much they were, you probably couldn't afford one. :)

[grandpa]

Over time I've learned to let many of those random thoughts remain that way ;-) I would be old enough to remember that term, and I don't. I wasn't really much of a hobbyist, buying my first couple of PC's already assembled. But I still hung around with a few geeks and did the swap meets in town from time to time. Maybe I thought those guys were selling guns, so I kept moving...

My first hard drive was a 10 meg. Is that a reference to a time before that?

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I did find something from 1980 with a reference to Winchester drives.. pre-granda era.
</add>

[mcavic]

Actually yes, I had a machine once, not that I actually used, but that I was playing with, and I recall that the BIOS had a message that was something like "error on Winchester #0". I think maybe the machine was a Wang.

[Lovejoy]

Hi All,

Here you go from my dusty archives :

[duxcw.com...]

Lovejoy- Out

[Essex_boy]

YEp I recall selling Winchester harddrives way back in 1988.

Oh boy!

[lgn1]

And now hitachi has 1 Terabyte hardrives. It took 12 years to get from 1GB to 1TB hard drives, Sugestest list $399.00

The smallest drive I bought was a 40mb hard drives from HP back in 1984 for around $6000 bucks.

[Pengi]

I remember how proud we were of our new office Winchester hard drive back in 1984. It was about the same size as a desk pedastal and had an amazing 60 MBytes!

[oddsod]

>>Is that a reference to a time before that?

Pre-Winchester, pre-3.25 FDD, pre 5.25" FDD, there were these circa 9" floppy drives. You had two slots in the PC, one for the operating system floppy and one for the storage. The good news was there was no MS Windows then.

[lawman]

No Windows indeed - there was dos. :)

[Pengi]

Yep 8" floppies - remember them.

[davewray]

I don't know much about the Winchester, but the first personal computer I had was the Atari 1040ST back in '85. Colour monitor, which was unheard of. It came in when Mac's were the personal computer of choice, and even then there weren't many with Mac's ;)

[en.wikipedia.org...]

Dave.