It may surprise younger technologists to learn that an entire generation of personal computers used ordinary audio equipment for storage. A cassette recorder wo

It may surprise younger technologists to learn that an entire generation of personal computers used ordinary audio equipment for storage. A cassette recorder would be used to read and write digital data, and one's archive of mass storage consisted of a pile of cassette tapes. Among the downsides (there were many) was the fact that a huge amount of time was required to read and write a few tens of kilobytes of data. I can remember begging Steve Jobs to relent and give me one of the new, rather expensive disk drives under development at Apple, so my work on Apple Writer would be sped up by perhaps ten times compared to the older storage methods. In this image of my system from about 1979 -- http://i.imgur.com/CjoRH.jpg http://i.imgur.com/CjoRH.jpg -- one can see two of the new storage devices -- floppy disk drives sitting on my Apple II -- and their immediate predecessor located at left center, a cassette recorder/player as a backup. Each floppy disk was able to contain 140 kilobytes of data. The new drives constituted a breakthrough in storage density and read/write time -- about five minutes to read or write a full disk of data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_II http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disk_II One of these drives and its controller card cost US$595.00 in 1978, equivalent to $2130.00 in today's dollars.