[sumtechguy]

Probably talking about swapping it in from some external datastore. These days you would open the file and dump it into a single buffer and rip across it, and not even really stress about it. Even 256 meg of hard drive. That would have been impressively expensive in the 80s.

Back then you had to chunk it out and fiddle with the offsets. Even then you still would have had to manage loading out the next chunk.

If my memory is right 1MB of memory in the early 90s was like 200-300 per meg. Would have to dig up a computer shopper and look.

[mschaef]

> Even 256 meg of hard drive. That would have been impressively expensive in the 80s.

I only have a couple reference points around this scale:

My dad's company had a system set up with a searchable index of a bunch of legal testimony. It was a Compaq Deskpro 386 running Unix with an attached 1GB disk. The 1GB disk set up was as big as the machine itself.

A few years later, I worked with a Cyber mainframe equipped with around 30GB of total attached disk storage. The disk array literally filled a room.

256MB disk on an 80's PC would have definitely been quite a bit.