Your 1st Hard Disk purchase, tell us ALL about it.

[+save2600]

Imagine of you will... an alternate universe where the Amiga was branded under the Atari moniker instead of Commodore. 🙃

[Keatah]

Ssshhh.. You're trying too hard to stir up an Atari-Commodore war. It will happen when it happens. Be patient!

[zzip]

16 hours ago, save2600 said:

Keep 'em coming boys, the Amiga hater-train is just taking off. All-a-bored!   (purposely misspelled for the all important pun)

How is saying that AmigaOS really needs a hard drive or at least more than one floppy 'hate'?   Any multitasking OS needs this to unlock its full potential.

 

14 hours ago, Keatah said:

Some unix jerk tell'ya that?

 

Multi-Tasking can be vague. Nebulous terms like "real" don't really say much - they rather define usefulness to someone. Solidifies and brongs to the forefront an opinion. Nothing more.

 

Shit, by those standards, A2 was multitasking in that it read the joystick port, generated sound, and drew graphics on the screen. That's multitasking right there! And all of it comes together as a game. And it is very "real" to me.

It was just conventional wisdom that Amiga was the first multitasking home computer so any prior examples of multitasking didn't count

 

Multitasking means the user can load more than one program of his/her choosing at the same time.  True multitasking means that all the apps run even when their window isn't active (otherwise it's just task-switching).   Desk accessories did both,  but their main limitation was they needed to be loaded at boot and programs had to be written to run as desk accessories.  MultiTOS later changed this so the desk accessory bar became like the Win95 task switcher, and you could load any GEM app into at any time,  not just .ACC files anymore

[prog99]

20mb scsi drive for my atari st (1991 I think). Can't remember the brand but know it had an ICD interface. Total game changer at the time and make coding a comparative dream compared to using floppies.

Edited September 14, 2022 by prog99

[Cebus Capucinis]

I remember the first time I slid it in. It felt amazing. Slotting that rigid tool into the perfect spot. So exciting!

 

Oh and I think the computer in the room had a hard drive in it or something, probably.

[Keatah]

14 hours ago, zzip said:

It was just conventional wisdom that Amiga was the first multitasking home computer so any prior examples of multitasking didn't count

True enough. Won't argue there.

 

14 hours ago, zzip said:

Multitasking means the user can load more than one program of his/her choosing at the same time.  True multitasking means that all the apps run even when their window isn't active (otherwise it's just task-switching).

As I kid I was amazed I could have a small software clock running in the background while the BBS was in use. But the clock would stop briefly while disk access happened. But if the CPU was off doing something else like running the BBS, sans disk activity, it was pretty solid.

 

I could stretch the idea of multi-processing in the Apple II by saying you could get a hardware clock or use the modem as a timebase. Two processors. Another was simply having an external printer buffer, a MicroBuffer, utterly amazing that I could play Repton while a 3-meter banner from PrintShop was printing. Again, two processors.

 

And yet there was another, a 6504 in the Enhancer ][ board, a board that added lowercase, macros, additional characters to the keyboard, and fave of mine, the type-ahead buffer.

 

Come to think of it. The stock Apple II, naturally, had only the 6502. But all these peripherals seemed to come with microcontrollers or microprocessors. The Sider II had/has a Z-80 IIRC, Cat Modem, it's own custom thing, clock card, keyboard enhancer, printer, buffer, and some disk controller cards also had their own 6502 on 'em. Z-80 CP/M board, arithmetic board, external modems, and likely more.

 

So, yeh.. in the roughest definition our 8-bit micros had multiple processors at work.

[Keatah]

One thing I didn't like about hard disks is all the space they offered. Huge culprits in ushering in the era of bloatware. And that fucking pagefile. I hate that too. Always gets used on my vintage XP machine. The whole rig crawls and begs for mercy.

 

Pagefile goes way back to the 1950's and it was IBM's hellspawn I believe.

[Cynicaster]

My first HD came with the Tandy 1000 SX my dad bought in the 80s, secondhand.  It had a whopping 20MB.  I actually ran a BBS on that thing.  

 

The next computer we got - I believe some sort of 486, if I recall - had a 400 or 500MB harddrive which, for a short time, I thought was effectively a bottomless pit of storage.  

 

That computer eventually started running like a dog and I really needed a computer for school work so my dad - congenitally incapable as he is of just letting old stuff go to buy new - decided to "upgrade" it with new processor, RAM, and HDD.  I remember it was the early 90s and I think the HDD was a 1.2GB or something like that.  It was hundreds of dollars - I think the overall upgrade was over $1000.  Yikes.  

 

 

[MrMaddog]

On 9/12/2022 at 3:41 PM, zzip said:

Cost was a problem on ST too.   ST even had the ACSI port that was based on the SCSI draft, in spite of that it still needed rather pricey hardware to convert it to true SCSI, that plus the cost of an external unit  (external drive cases back then were not cheap like the USB ones we can get today)

 

 

I've learned to make due to using only floppies on my STe, made a main boot disk with an alternative desktop program with useful ultilties and RAMDisks.  Using a RAMDisk is very useful if you have more RAM than drive space.  Plus each of my applicationshad their own disk with accompanying DA's and AUTO programs.  Using a reset-proof RAMDisk I can download a, let's say, a GIF file and reboot to run a viewer program w/o having to use other floppy disks unless I want to keep that file for good.

 

When I had a HD for that brief time, I used SuperBoot which had profiles that acted like virtual boot disks.

 

On 9/13/2022 at 10:02 AM, zzip said:

But I was always told desk accessories didn't count as 'real' multitasking even though they could run simultaneously with your main program.

 

Tell that to Apple & DRI...

 

When I used STalker for dial-up Internet  I had the STeno text editor which also acted as a capture buffer, UIS III for file operations w/o leaving my program, a full screen VT100 emulator that used all 25 lines for IRC chat and a couple of DA games to play while I was downloading.

 

Even now on Windows 10 I use UWP apps as Desk Accesories that run along side my main Win32 applications.

 

[digdugnate]

our first hard drive was in the family computer- I *want* to say that was a 20meg 'hard card' in our Tandy 1000 EX.  That machine was a weird beast with those funky Tandy/Radio Shack-propietary cards.