Got a VIC-20 for my 13th birthday in 1983. The local TV shop sold Commodore hardware and hosted a BBS that my little nerd cronies and I connected to at 300 bps.

Got a VIC-20 for my 13th birthday in 1983. The local TV shop sold Commodore hardware and hosted a BBS that my little nerd cronies and I connected to at 300 bps. All of us knew the owner who ran the store and mentored us and hired some of us when we got old enough. On one visit he took me back, behind an actual curtain, and showed me the BBS machine. If you know the 1541 Disk Drive, you know. Well this beast had a Commodore branded 5 MB hard disk connected to a C-64. In my memory it was 6” by 8” by 24” long, with an enormous power supply, and must have cost thousands of Reagan-first-term US dollars. Two or three years later another mentor hired me to put a 33 MB hard disk into his IBM PC. Not a clone. My memory tells me it was a DOS imposed limit, those 33 MB: the biggest drive available. I managed to plug the connector in upside down and released the magic smoke. That was a many-hundreds-of-dollars mistake. (And a good lesson in patient mentoring.) In 1991 I obtained a used 80 MB drive (half height!) to put into my own PC XT clone, via a local Usenet group. I set the volume name to $1_PER_MB because going under that threshold was so impressive. Those are my reference points for storage.