User Error?

[km6xz]

They were big, with large linear power supplies. My fist hard drive was a Corvus which was $4200 for the basic drive and another $1000 for the OS...yearly. It was gigantic, 5meg. Later I replaced that one with a monster, 10 mb drive that was about the size of the original IBM PC before the XT came out. The full IBM XT was a whopping 4.7mhz clock with and there were only 3 real shrink-wrapped programs available at the time; dBase II, Lotus 123, and a crude MS Flight Simulator. Soon after, Wordstar was ported over to MS-DOS. I had the hard drive shared between 4 other floppy only PCs(the floppy drives were $525 each and had 180kb capacity, later to be increased to 360kb) using twisted pair ARCNET. All the accounting, scheduling, booking and inventory and tape library functions were done on those crude machines. As far as a I know they were the first networked system in a recording studio. The 5 meg drive was enough for all those functions. It was enough to run ACAD 1.0 which I bought for $1800 from the developers before they released it generally. It came on 3 floppies, one for the program, one for drivers, and one for drawing samples. The next step up in CAD at the time was $100,000, so AutoCAD sold like hotcakes as a true bargain. Before the PCs were using a IBM System 32 which needed a full time programmer just to run reports, and IO was a teletype machine. That cost $2000 a month for the lease and another $1200 a month for the OS. So in a year the multi-user network using the PCs paid for itself in 6 months.
Now, every photo of a 1000 club shoot takes up 16-18mb on my drives-twice, with RAID real time backup. Life was a lot simpler before computers dominated work and social life. Music was better also....