[mikewarot]

Circa 1987, DOS boot disk had a "Backpack" hard disk driver on it, so I could plug it in the parallel printer port and boot up with 300 Megabytes of my stuff instantly available as D: on on any customer machine. It made service calls a lot easier to manage, no more stacks of floppy disks.

300 Megabytes!!!

I had all my source code on it, archives, utilities, compilers, the whole shebang!

[glhaynes]

Surely 30 MB in 1987, not 300, right?

[mikewarot]

Here's the PDF of the product line[1] with the price list from 1987.... 300 Megabytes was $789. I was the entire tech staff for Management Support Systems, and had written an inspection reporting system for fossil fuel generating systems in Turbo Pascal under MS-DOS that talked to Norand corporation portable computers with Symbol Technologies barcode scanners. The portables were rated for a 3 foot drop to concrete, and you could use them outdoors in winter, with gloves on... amazing stuff.

[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/microSolutions/MicroSolutions_P...

[glhaynes]

I stand corrected! Awesome, thanks for the link and the story.