[raiph]

> Much later, in the second half of the 90s, I remember the four of us carrying an IBM HDD -- I think it was your normal 5.25" drive but it needed four people because it was mounted on a vibration dampening base ...

Continuing the shades of Monty Python theme[1]:

I remember one of my first few nights being in charge of the new IBM kit (I was a "computer operator" back then, in 1980), leaning back in the fancy new chair at the desk with its fancy "virtual" teletypes (a couple "terminals" displaying the status of the OS with a CICS system), and showing off to an "underling" by swinging a long plastic slide rule or something stupid like that (I no longer recall), and me accidentally banging it on the desk. Right "near" a recessed big red button. Or perhaps "on" the button? As I snapped my head around to look at the button and begin to understand what I may have just done I heard an ominous series of whirring and clicking sounds coming from the cpu box, right near where there was an 8" diskette drive that wasn't supposed to be doing anything while the OS was running (it was just for starting the OS). Then I looked at the console... Uhoh. They didn't fire me but it took months before they decided to let me be "in charge" again with someone else actually hovering over me...

Fast forward to when I was a coder (BCPL) in a small software startup, during the second half of the 80s, presumably 10 years before you were carrying your 5.25" drive monster, I vividly recall someone bringing a 700MB hard drive back from a local computer store. It cost an astonishingly paltry 700 quid or thereabouts. A pound a MB!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKHFZBUTA4k

[chx]

> I vividly recall someone bringing a 700MB hard drive back from a local computer store. It cost an astonishingly paltry 700 quid or thereabouts.

I ... do not know. That sounds very low. Look at https://jcmit.net/diskprice.htm and note the pound was 1.8-ish around this time so the price should have been well above 1000 pounds even in early 90s. We are talking of a 5.25" full height drive, here's an 1987 model http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/maxtor/MXT8760E.pdf rare in personal computers, it was definitely for workstations / servers.