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fangelo2 t1_iu4ahuo wrote

C:\ Is all you saw when you turned it on.

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smoky77211 t1_iu4ca7b wrote

Doubtful. It likely needed you to load DOS.

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HaikuBotStalksMe t1_iu4mx7m wrote

I think by 1989, OSes were installed to local drive.

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ItDoesntMatter59 t1_iu6nfyf wrote

Boot from floppy was normal. HDD was more expensive and my first pc had a 10mb drive.

Mb. Not gb.

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HaikuBotStalksMe t1_iu6ty4v wrote

10 mb is huge for that time. The OS would have been like, what, 800 kilobytes? So after formatting and stuff, I'd figure you had 9.5 megs free.

Install DOS to hardrive, you have crazy fast boot times (probably 15 seconds instead of a minute), and still like 8.8 megabytes for all your text files.

I started computing in 1995ish with a 300ish meg hardrive (I think 320). It was reasonably sized until like 1999.

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notacanuckskibum t1_iu6xe11 wrote

Things were changing so fast it’s hard to remember exactly where we were in which year. 1989 would have been about Windows 1.0.

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TheWausauDude t1_iu4gj9y wrote

I’ve got an old Ibm “portable” pc that’s more of a suitcase from 1983 laying around yet. It fires up but immediately takes you to what looks like an old version of Basic. While it has a hard drive I’m sure it’s probably bad as the light for it seems to just cycle on and off over and over.

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notacanuckskibum t1_iu6x2qv wrote

The one where the keyboard acts as a lid, with a 3” screen and twin 5” floppy drives? I remember working on one of those. Geophysics and charting.

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TheWausauDude t1_iu70y1f wrote

Yeah that’s it. The keyboard folds down and you have the little yellow monochrome screen on the left with the drives on the right. Keyboard connects with what appears to be a phone jack. It even has a carry case that zips up around it, but I can’t imagine lugging one of those around. Damn thing must weigh at least 20-30lbs.

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notacanuckskibum t1_iu71gfe wrote

Yes. More a luggable than a laptop. But we were heading into rural Norway with Land Rovers and stuff. The ability to bring a computer of any type along was mind blowing at the time.

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