[cctalk] Re: Getting floppy images to/from real floppy disks.

[Paul Koning via cctalk]

> On May 30, 2023, at 1:22 PM, Mike Katz via cctalk <cctalk@classiccmp.org> 
> wrote:
> 
> In 1981 when i got my first 5MB hard disk drive at work (I had to write the 
> drivers for the OS myself) I was able to put all or my source code, binaries, 
> executable, applications and the operating system and not fill half of that 
> disk.
> 
> A single .raw file from my camera can be over 20MB now.
> 
> Is technology advancing us or just helping us to create more and more storage 
> needs 😁?

Yes.

We used to call that the "virtual disease" in honor of the fact that VMS 
applications tended to be 5x or 10x the size of PDP-11 applications that do 
similar things.  As a result, developing for both by wring it for VMS and then 
backporting to PDP-11 tended to give terminally bad performance, while going 
the other way worked quite well. ("KOALA" which I'm not sure ever shipped, 
comes to mind as an example of the former.)

Disk drive growth is pretty amazing.  My first hard drive was 256 kB (an RC-11, 
on the college physics department PDP-11/20 in 1973).  Amd even the big hard 
drives on the main timesharing system weren't that much bigger (2.4 MB each, a 
pair of RK05s).

        paul