Unlike computing today, the big issue for computing in the 1980s was disk compatibility. Yep, as I’ve been crowing all along, it’s the software that drives the hardware industry. That was true in the early 1980s, and it was also insane.
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\nYou probably don’t think anything about sticking a CD into your computer today to see what’s on it. Whether you have a PC or Mac, the disc is read, music is played, a video is watched, the disc is blank and needs formatting, or it’s just plain unusable. No big deal.<\/p>\n
Back in 1982, however, disks were fussy \u2014 and the disk drives were expensive. I paid $800 for my first 180K disk drive and the floppy disks cost about $5 each \u2014 in bulk.<\/p>\n
Sticking any old disk into your computer’s disk drive met mostly with failure. That’s because the computers of the day didn’t understand each other’s disk formats. Even if you had two computers running the CP\/M operating system, odds were really good that they couldn’t read each other’s disk formats.<\/p>\n
A software store had stacks of software for each computer platform. Going into the local Software-O-Rama you saw the following categories: IBM PC, CP\/M, Apple II, Commodore 64, and others. (TRS-80 software was sold only through Radio Shack.)<\/p>\n
Fortunately, there were versions of popular programs for each of the different hardware makes and models. Still, even though you could buy the same program for different computers, it didn’t mean you should share data. A WordStar file from an Apple II computer might not be readable on an IBM PC, even if you could get the file from one computer to another.<\/p>\n
It wasn’t until MS-DOS took over the market by the late 1980s that disk compatibility ceased to be an issue.<\/p>\n
So we had a lot of floppy disks back then. In fact, I remember having several hundred 5 1\/4-inch floppy disks. Yes, I labeled them.<\/p>\n
Originally, the floppy disks were single-sided; information could be recorded only on one side of the disk. Then double-sided drives appeared, which also doubled the disk’s capacity from 180K to 360K.<\/p>\n
In 1984, the Macintosh introduced the 3 1\/2-inch diskette, which had a hard case so it wasn’t really a floppy<\/em> disk anymore. It stored 400K on a single side, but was utterly incompatible with any other computer.<\/p>\n In 1987, IBM introduced the 3 1\/2-inch diskette for the PC\/MS-DOS computers. It held 720K in a double-sided format. Eventually a double-density<\/em> version of the diskette was available that stored 1.2MB of information. The Mac, too, got a double-sided 800K floppy diskette.<\/p>\n Double-density and double-sided were popular disk terms in the 1980s.<\/p>\n Hard drives came about slowly in the 1980s. The second generation PC, the IBM PC\/XT came with a 10MB hard drive. That was in 1983 or so. I remember buying a 20MB hard drive for about $400 in 1985. It was my first PC hard drive, but DOS back then could only “see” 10MB at a time, so I had to partition the drive into C: and D:.<\/p>\n Hard drives remained rare during most of the 1980s. Many people primarily used floppy disks even into the early 1990s; the hard drive was optional on a PC.<\/p>\n I remember paying $1000 for a 90MB hard drive in 1989.<\/p>\n Yeah, that was a lot of money for only 90MB, but consider that files back then weren’t really that large: New software still came on 360K floppy disks, which was the least common denominator. So program files were, at most 360K in size. Data files were smaller.<\/p>\n Disk capacity didn’t become a big issue until the 1990s, when computers routinely stored large graphics files. Then later came music and video files in the late 1990s, which required even more storage. But for storage in the 1980s, that was pretty much it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unlike computing today, the big issue for computing in the 1980s was disk compatibility. Yep, as I’ve been crowing all along, it’s the software that drives the hardware industry. That was true in the early 1980s, and it was also insane.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-main"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=772"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":781,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/772\/revisions\/781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wambooli.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}