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I don't know why I just remembered an old disc unit which had 5(?) plates, each about half an inch thick with a diameter of about 10 inches and a capacity of whopping 1 MB ... good old days. Biggest accident at work: dropped a program on the floor and had to re-sort for hours (punch cards anyone?)
awesome. it is amazing how far we've come on hardware. software maybe not so much. to think that the worlds biggest active database might end up being Facebook is sad. no surprise though, we are all just human after all.
i moved into a house around '99 where the previous owner had been running a data conversion company out of the huge attic. he had the most ancient machines i had ever seen in person installed in this house (not downtown). when i moved in his machines were gone, but for years i found ancient (cold war looking) tapes, connectors, and manuals. the guy was transferring data from literally decades ago into modern databases.
i started about 1984 on a tandy coco, 1986 atari xe, then a shared amiga, then mac, then windows 95, then mac osx. i wasn't paid as an IT guy until probably 93-94 though, and never corporate. always internet startups, small business, vertical market stuff.




Member since:
2012-06-20
ok old grey beard i take back calling you son. you've been around. i too know of the giant tape machines and cobol. i also know that world is now more or less called a server closet or the cloud, and that apple has never tried to compete in that market.
corporate IT working with mainframes - of course you think of apples as toys. on that level of IT they aren't competing.
i also remember small companies with 20 macs, pc's and a few linux servers started to take the business from the old guys running room sized computers and a huge IT budget.
so from the home computer, consumer computing perspective (which is the only market apple exists in ) they were nearly owning those production markets.