Dennys said.....


[snip lots of stuff about big and little disks/discs]
>On that nostalgic note, the rain has started here in South Texas, and
>vacation time has arrived.

As the rain gently hits the ground, I start thinking back to my early
days.....

I first started working at HP Rockville in 1977.  Well really I was
working for my father who was considering purchasing an HP.  So I spent
time that summer converting his FORTRAN programs to the HP3000.
I started working in for HP later that summer.

HP Rockville had a Series II.  They had just disconnected an ISS drive
which was even bigger than the 7920 or 7925 in phsical size, but was
only 47 mb.  The replaced these drives with the 7920 (50mb) which came
out before the 7925.

They also had a little (realativly speaking) drive called the 7905.
Now my mind isn't remembering everything about it so someone will
have to correct me.  As I remember it had a fixed drive and a
removable cartridge.  I think the total of these two drives had a
total of 15 mb.  Some time later, HP came out with a 7906 which I think
increased that total to a wopping 20mb.

As I sit here on my PC at home, if I want to reboot from Windows 3.1 to
Windows NT (happy Denys?), I just pop in another Jaz disk.  This is
phsycially the size of about three 3.5 inch floppies.

And last Sunday, I ordered a laptop from Gateway for my wife.  It came
with a 5gb removable hard drive.
Monday, my wife e-mailed me that Gateway had dropped
the price of the laptop $100 and increased the size of the disk from
5gb to 8gb.  As you can guess, I was back at the Gateway store on
Tuesday modifying the order.

One bottom line is that this field is in costant flux and it allows
more software written since there is far more disk (or disc) space
to install it on.

Enjoy the much needed rain Denys.  We have been in opressive heat
and humidity here near Washington DC.

/alan