I was tidying out the garage the other day and stumbled across this. Which will give you some idea of the state of the garage. My toe still hurts. It’s a 10 megabyte hard drive that last saw service (I think) in a genuine IBM PC-XT. That’s the sort with an 8088 CPU and MS-DOS dating from 1983/4.  I used it in the late 80’s & early 90’s at Computer Shopper Shows to illustrate just how much hardware had progressed.

The chip by the side of it is a 1Gb SD card that will  just about store 100 times as much information. A decent modern hard drive will, of course, manage around 3000 times as much data - again in a tiny fraction of the space.

Check out the electronics on the underside too - unlike a modern drive that has all the controller stuff on the same “chassis” the chips here are just for data interfacing. This thing needed a separate controller board that took up one of your precious XT expansion slots.

As with all early PC electronics the chip count is very high which, of course, is why, in real terms, this disk alone would be priced at over £1000. Plus VAT. We also see in the mags these days special “quiet” PC’s - fire this thing up & you’ll know just what quiet actually means though not get anywhere near that state while it’s switched on.

It does, however, still have a use. If I can’t reach something on a high shelf  it makes a nice stable platform to stand on !