Post by a***@NOW.AT.arargh.com<snip<
Post by Frank McCoy*Much* faster.
Not only that; but you can get fairly cheap removable disk-drives at about two
dollars a gig, if you want off-site backup. (Non-removable drives can get as
cheap as $.50 a gig.) That's if you don't mind _relatively_ slow USB drives.
They're still _much_ faster than most tape-drives.
Today, I would probably go for SATA drives in hot-swapable carriers,
assuming that NT 4 can even support them. The trick is to convince NT
4 that are 'removable' devices, so that I don't have to re-boot to
change them.
Post by Frank McCoyIt seems a bit funny though, to spend much *more* on your backup drives than on
your primary system ... But that's the way it is today. Still much cheaper than
the past; even though the capacity has bloomed into a monster.
If I tried to add up all that I have spent on computer systems
(processors, disk drives, printers, terminals, modems, . . .) over
the last 30 years, I would probably be shocked - easily over 100 grand
- hell, the first real system was over 10 grand all by itself, back
in 1975.
I spent $4,000 on my first system in about 1972 or 1973: A used Altair 8080
system (that I finally sold to a collector about 3 or 4 years ago) that the
company had used to do their billing on. I bought it from them when they
changed systems, because I had too much *personal* effort wrapped up in the
system to just see it go. After all, I had built the thing and done essentially
*all* the programming on it; starting from toggling programs in through the
front-panel to writing my own (crappy) Operating System.
The next system I got (about four years later) was a really *crappy* Zenith
IBM-Clone of an XT, with two floppies. Over the years, that system has morphed
into what I have now; with changes of about a fifteen processors and about a
dozen different motherboards, five cases, about twenty different types and
interfaces of hard-drives, and every video-board type from the original IBM
black-and-white to my present 128-meg super-whizbang All-in-wonder card. There
isn't a single item that hasn't been replaced at least five times; but, in a
way, it's still the original system, as each part got replaced separately, and
each change was made on the existing system. Not once did I go with something
entirely new.
I even have a lot of the old original software ... And the newer systems have
finally gotten FAST enough to decently *emulate* the old slow ones ... So I can
finally run a lot of my old and slow software that I used to run. A piece of
software called "DOSbox", is a wonderful tool for making old software run on new
machines ... IF you take the trouble to tune it up for each one.
I just got my old SPACEWAR game running on it ... Something designed for an old
8088 with a Hercules B&W graphics card. When setup right, it looks and runs
just like it did on the old Zenith. ;-}
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