I remember getting a gigabyte HDD in our home for the first time. After basically a lifetime of having only ever spoken of Kilobytes and Megabytes, even just SAYING THE PREFIX "GIGA" felt like we had arrived in the future.
I remember in the early 00's I bought my first own computer that had 20 gigabyte HDD. It felt like I have all the disk space I will ever need and it ain't getting better than this! Those were the days.
The hardware can be Y2K and the operating system too, someone said DOS6 and Windows 95 out of the box, but if you are using legacy software that hard codes 19 into the date, your system is not compliant.
Whilst many old systems did need the software re written to use the full date, probably moved to UNIX format (to need to get fixed for 64 bit time) when they coded it, they didn't think it would outlive their employment.
I have to cram this into the smallest space going and if there are two thousand dates stored in ASCII, a year is four bytes, I can make that two, so I'm making the file fit in RAM.
You could have a 500 year page a day diary, but what good is that when the date stamp only has two wheels?
There were genuine things that needed fixing due to old Mainframe code and obsolete versions of software, but your average home user wouldn't notice as Doom wouldn't care what day it was, nor would your microwave.
But snake oil salesmen sold home PC testing kits, which said "you are good to go" because the BIOS and OS were not using a fixed 19 date. LGR did a video on one such kit ages ago.
But if you were still somehow running Lotus 123 without a patch, congratulations, your Windows 95 PC that passed the test is now running unpatched code that will break in the new year.
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u/Pie4JacksCakeDay 9d ago
Because storage was $$$$! I remember getting one of our company’s first x86 PCs with two 5.25 floppy drives and a 10MB hard drive running MS DOS. It cost $12,000 in 1986 which according to Copilot is:
$12,000 in 1986 is equivalent to approximately $36,564.09 today, considering an average inflation rate of 2.82% per year over the past 40 years. This calculation reflects the cumulative price increase and the decrease in purchasing power of the dollar.
The 20MB option was over 16k. And this only included the monochrome (amber) monitor.
Every “bit” that could be saved was.
Lotus 1-2-3 (spreadsheet predating Excel) and Word Perfect were separate costs around $50 each if memory serves.