Home Forums FineTunedMac Community Lounge Food for Thought When You Are At the Apple Store

In sum, I prefer my computer being the product of my whims, whimseys, and needs rather than me being an extension of its, i.e. Apple's, whims, whimseys, and demands.

And I"m willing to pay for it!

Which is, of course, the original philosophy underlying the original Mac in 1984. People with the existing desktops were busy tearing their hair out by the roots and screaming in agony when a single wrong keystroke caused 3 or 4 hours of work to go 'poof' and disappear. Then, along comes the Mac whose basic tenet was that the user was in charge, not the computer.

Well, at least something has remained the same since 1984. I recall my first Mac...small black and white screen, only a couple of pieces of software available, and it cost waaaay more than those 'other' machines. People thought I was nuts.

I remember when I bought my first external hard drive for my Mac SE (c. 1986?). It was about the same size as say a Seagate 2 TB Desktop model of today, but it was 10 MB (not GB or TB!). It was blazingly fast (in those days) and increased the storage capacity immensely. At that time the double-sided 800 kb floppy (not really physically so) disk was queen. To now have 10 MB, well, mind boggling! Oh, and if I recall, the external drive cost somewhere around $400 in those days.

A 2007 article I saw announcing the 40th anniversary of the invention of the floppy disk noted that the first commercially available floppy offered 100KB (NOT M, G, or T, but K) storage and cost $10,000 (ten thousand).

I wonder if that floppy was the size of a small pizza.

If you really want to be in charge then why aren't you running Ubuntu on a home-brew PC?

8½" in all likelihood, at least that was what I had on my Ohio Scientific microcomputer.

8-inch floppy disk

8-inch floppy disk
The first floppy disk was 8 inches in diameter,[1] was protected by a flexible plastic jacket and was a read-only device used by IBM as a way of loading microcode.[24] Read/write floppy disks and their drives became available in 1972 but it was IBM's 1973 introduction of the 3740 data entry system[25] that began the establishment of floppy disks, called by IBM the "Diskette 1", as an industry standard for information interchange. Early microcomputers used for engineering, business, or word processing often used one or more 8-inch disk drives for removable storage; the CP/M operating system was developed for microcomputers with 8-inch drives.

The family of 8-inch disks and drives increased over time and later versions could store up to 1.2 MB;[26] many microcomputer applications did not need that much capacity on one disk, so a smaller size disk with lower-cost media and drives was feasible. The ​5 1⁄4-inch drive succeeded the 8-inch size in many applications, and developed to about the same storage capacity as the original 8-inch size, using higher-density media and recording techniques.