Tainted Love, as played by...

[raindog308]

...floppy drives.

http://www.youtube.com/embed/nOMX3deeW6Q

 

[wlanboy]

Just found my old USB 100 MB Iomega Zip drive.

How would I ever fill 100 MB with information?

 

[Nett]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_350#IBM_350

3.75 MB HDD

 

[HalfEatenPie]

That's... amazing.

Really enjoyed it haha.

I remember the zip drives @wlanboy, never really got acquainted with them because my home only had a floppy drive (and I used Windows 95/98 for the longest time), but I will admit we've come a long way from floppy disks.

 

[raindog308]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_350#IBM_350

3.75 MB HDD

IT was fundamentally different then.  Everything was "run this set of information through this algorithm".  I'm using the term "algorithm" loosely - it could be sort by customer last name, sum up total sales for the month, etc.  There really was not a concept of "put a database somewhere and run queries against it" or "login to a screen and work interactively with an application".  The mentality was "dump punch cards in the hopper and run a semi-abstracted mechanical process to perform math on them".

They really were closer to babbage-type tabulators than modern computers.

Later tape drives were used in much the same function - "start at the beginning of tape 12481 and read every record in the dataset and total column #4" sort of operations.

 

[DomainBop]

Later tape drives were used in much the same function

Somebody say tape drive? I still have a few drawers full of these... (this backup tape is older than the average summer host)