COMPUTER ARCHAEOLOGY (29 december 2003)
What is the object in the picture? No, not the glasses. The glasses just serve to get some idea about the actual size.
It was my first diskdrive. If you want to know the exact size: it was 33x16x9 cm (about the size of a four-sandwich toaster). If you wanted to buy it, you had to pay about two thousand guilders (900 euros).
You had to feed it the old-fashioned 5.25 inch floppy disks. You will probably have seen them: the big black square ones with the disk visible through holes on both sides of the cardboard-like cover. The disks had about one eighth of the capacity of the modern 3.5 inch floppies.
The computer itself was a TRS80 (model 1), which had less than one thousandth of the memory of a modern PC, but still cost you about 3000 guilders. But that was without any diskdrives. The manufacturer (Tandy) shipped it with a cassette-recorder to record data.
If you wanted to buy one diskdrive for it, you did not only need the diskdrive shown in the picture on top, but also another piece of apparatus called an expansion interface, which cost another two thousand guilders. So the computer with one diskdrive (no harddisk!) would cost you about 7000 guilders. Can you imagine that my friends thought me crazy to buy such a useless thing at a price that would have bought you a good second-hand car?
Another time (
