Watching my Ubuntu update tonight, I wondered what would have happened
back in 1984, when I built my original Heathkit PC, if there had been
downloads of the size that is normal nowadays. Multiple amounts of GBs.
That first PC had 2 floppy drives, and a Hard drive so small I can't
remember what the units were, for 40 of them. MBs?
In those days, a 56k modem was lightning fast.

Another fact: the Heathkit replaced a Sinclair ZX-81, which I still
have. It hasn't been powered up for years, though.
--
Davey.

Hello Davey!

Tuesday March 12 2024 23:38, Davey wrote to All:

> Watching my Ubuntu update tonight, I wondered what would have happened
> back in 1984, when I built my original Heathkit PC, if there had been
> downloads of the size that is normal nowadays. Multiple amounts of
> GBs. That first PC had 2 floppy drives, and a Hard drive so small I
> can't remember what the units were, for 40 of them. MBs? In those
> days, a 56k modem was lightning fast.

> Another fact: the Heathkit replaced a Sinclair ZX-81, which I still
> have. It hasn't been powered up for years, though.
> --
> Davey.

Ram would have been from 64k to 640k, OS CPM, xxDOS and may be a ram
extender to bring total up to 1Mb.
Modem from 300 (if you operated a coupler where you plugged in the
telephone receiver), 1200, 2400 and later 9600 - if you were rich or used a
private wire (in the early 80's I did between house and office) so I could
work from home as an office line extension or to connect to the office
mainframe (OK, it was a Cromemco Z-3 running 8" floppies (2.4Mb) and a
large DASD (hard drive) in 19" rack/cabinet with 80Mb fixed and 16Mb
removable.

When the company closed I took the Cromemco, DASD, 2 matrix line printers
home as it still had the company accounts on it using my ACAS accounting
software that with updates, upgrades etc., is still in use today with the
Cobol sources on SF.

My partner took home a very home brew micro based computer that run nuder
CPM and DOS that was used to create floppies on 8", 5.25" and 3.5" for the
many brands of micros we supported with software from the OS to a lot of
different applications that needles to say al had differing floppy
disc formats. This machine had a very bespoke version of CPM and MSDOS to
copy with all this.

I sold off the Cromemco with all the manuals, software (sans the accounting
s/w and data (that was wiped) via eBay in the early 00's.

When running the Cromemco and more importantly the DASD it would heat up my
study / office and a fair bit of the house and by then was well superseded
by 8" hard drives that was many time larger that the 80/16 DASD and cheaper
to run (electricity). I stopped using the floppies many years earlier when
it was turned on despite being able to connect to it via a PC instead of
using the Cromemco VDU terminal.

As I also ran a BBS the modem got upgraded to 57K, 64Kb x 2 when I was
running the ADSL x 2 land line. Which I though at the time was the super
speed :) but by the early 10's switched over to early broadband and
discontinued the modems (x6 by then as I started dropped the land lines as
their contracts ended) which saved a lot of money.By this time the modems
were running at 64Kb or higher (with compression).

Yes then then 10 - 30 Mb was the max size of files received for the BBS but
now that can be many times greater for the big packages such as main frame
MVS systems and there is a few in the 500 Gb in size and possibly higher
but I know that the file storage for all BBS files available to download
is in the many TB's.

How times have changed from the 70's :)

Vincent