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Comment by JKCalhoun | Hacker News Reader

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JKCalhoun

Would there have been a 95MB disk drive available for the AppleII in those days? (And at what cost?)

Amazing though.

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Not a chance, no. Here's something from 1985:

https://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n8/36_The_Sider_1...

> Five years ago I drooled over the new 5Mb Winchester hard disk drives being introduced to the Apple II market. Although I knew how useful a hard disk could be, I also knew that I would never be able to justify the purchase of a $3000 mass storage device for a $2000 computer. I also knew that I would never be able to fill 5Mb of disk space.

> How times have changed. Today, a full fledged Apple IIc or IIe costs a little over $1000. And a 10Mb hard disk drive costs only $695. That's right. First Class Peripherals offers the Sider, a hard disk drive with 10Mb partitionable among four operating systems for $695.

It would have been possible with a SCSI card and multiple drives.

When I bought my first PC right out of college in 1991, it had a 200MB hard drive. A professor I mentioned this to said that I was crazy and that I'd never fill 200MB.

It was about a megabyte per cassette tape, depending on the encoding, right (counting both sides)? Doable, with lots of tape swapping, I guess :)

Though probably a shorter version would be nicer

[edit] Forget that, from the Reddit link: “We end up reading data at about 533KB/sec, and are I/O bound.”

A custom-made cassette reading peripheral card in every slot, and eight cassette players running in parallel at high speed?

I like how you think :)

Lol, this should be done.

Dealing with sync issues would be top of the list.

Maybe stagger them, so they can be stopped every so often. Reach key data, kill motor, wait, start motor?