> 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.
I remember my dad bought a 500MB hard drive for our Apple IIgs. It cost like $500-600 as I recall, not cheap by any means. I remember thinking that no way would we ever fill it up - which, to be fair, we never did. 500MB would fill up instantly now, but programs and data were so much smaller back then that it lasted until the computer eventually stopped being used.