50th Anniversary of invention of disk drives 4586

Yeah. Been there, done that. Not really imagining, just remembering. :)

In some ways, it was better. For one, you generally got an OS that would boot very very fast, mostly by not providing you with crap you neither need nor want.

(Mostly, I don't reboot if I can help it these days. I just lock the screen and turn off the monitor.)

I don't agree.

Without hard drives, something else would have come up. High-capacity floppy drives. Machines might have a lot more RAM, and then just boot from tape or drum or punched cards.

In fact, that might lead to an interesting infrastructure. Imagine if computers had lots more RAM instead of disk -- the idea that an application could crash the OS (and all other applications and data) would simply not be tolerated. You'd "back up" your documents by copying them in memory, and then saving the memory image to tape (or drum or yadda yadda yadda).

(IIRC, core memory survived power outages. That's as good as disk, really; those futurists that predicted room-sized and building-sized computers would have been right. Google might even still exist, but would be building their own skycrapers...)

We might have gone for 64-bit processors a lot sooner, when a few measly megabytes of RAM Just Weren't Enough.

We might have clustered machines earlier and more often.

You just can't say "there would be no way". There would be a way. It would look different than what we have now, much like the way we fly is different from the way a bird flies.

Heh.

-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Don't worry about it; having seen you in action, our expectations are hardly insurmountable. -Gharlane