3 ms·

Maybe this is a bit difficult for me to be non-biased because I started working on putting hard drives into the original IBM PC in our gray market shop, and I'v

Maybe this is a bit difficult for me to be non-biased because I started working on putting hard drives into the original IBM PC in our gray market shop, and I've been working (or leading engineering teams) that have integrated hard drives for 30 years. However, in my mind, the original IBM PC hard drive wasn't a lot harder than any home builder upgrading his or her PC today. The original IBM PC had a 63 watt power supply (I hope I'm remembering correct), so you had to take this out and put in a bigger one, but this was simple. Then you open up your hard drive box and put the paddle card in the slot and screwed in the HDD in one of the bays. You need to know a few CLI commands like fdisk and format c: /s/v, and you had a c: prompt. The problem is that there was no youtube or internet. If you didn't know the few steps, this might as well have been black magic. (Even though most HDD kits did come with some instructions.) The Quantum guys (a company I later worked for) came up with a novel idea of putting a hard drive on a card, and you could just plug in the card and that was it. This was the peak of simplicity, but carried a premium, so it was a niche product. By the way, what most people don't realize is that the 3.5" form factor was actually the first portable hard drive. It was designed by Conner for the Compaq portable. Bill Frank was the technology guru at Western Digital, then a silicon maker, that lead the creation of IDE for Conner, the forerunner of SATA. So it was tricky because of the lack of knowledge, but the actual work was pretty simple.

brudgers 8y ago
At the time, I thought it was relatively simple myself. I guess what I am trying to say is that the bar for "simple" was lower back then. Setting DIP's, using needle nose pliers to move jumpers and sorting out IRQ's was as normal as using a timing light to adjust a Buick's points. That there was a market for those Quantum disks (which I had long since forgot until now) existed because of that complexity. On the other hand, back then building a PC was probably easier because there were far fewer choices...thanks to a combinatorial explosion of CPU sockets, RAM specifications, MB form factors and such today. And anyone building a PC probably knew someone who had built one, if only the computer store owner. The analogy I'd use is that it was simple back then to the degree Linux is simple today: reasonably logical and well documented. But Arch ain't iOS.

brudgers 8y ago

At the time, I thought it was relatively simple myself. I guess what I am trying to say is that the bar for "simple" was lower back then. Setting DIP's, using needle nose pliers to move jumpers and sorting out IRQ's was as normal as using a timing light to adjust a Buick's points. That there was a market for those Quantum disks (which I had long since forgot until now) existed because of that complexity. On the other hand, back then building a PC was probably easier because there were far fewer choices...thanks to a combinatorial explosion of CPU sockets, RAM specifications, MB form factors and such today. And anyone building a PC probably knew someone who had built one, if only the computer store owner. The analogy I'd use is that it was simple back then to the degree Linux is simple today: reasonably logical and well documented. But Arch ain't iOS.