GROWTH MEDIUM: HOW WE OWE ALMOST EVERYTHING TO THE HDD
The first hardware upgrade I ever bought for my own PC wasn’t a graphics card, or more RAM, or a new CPU. It was a hard disk drive. Assuming my biological data storage system is working properly, I seem to recall it was a Quantum ProDrive LPS, with a capacity of 425MB. It cost me $450 - oh and $65 for the dude at the shop to install it and set all the jumpers right.
There’s an argument to be made that it’s the hard disk drive that set the IBM PC apart from its competition.
Like machines from Apple, Tandy, Osborne, and others, in 1981 the first IBM PC didn’t ship with an HDD. But hard drives were available right out of the gate from third party manufacturers. (Okay, so maybe it’s really the open hardware standard that sets the
