In 1993, I got a job at the Seattle School District in the telephony division. My boss was also the director of of a new department: Information Services…the name is still around! So he was the director of the School District’s employee information. in other words, he was in charge of creating the district’s (100 schools 50,000 employees) directory; this was compiled by school, and listed every teacher, counselor, administrator and help lines. This was a massive compiling of data, and sometime in the 80’s he requested and received the funding for a $10k 100mb harddrive. $100/mb…can you believe that?

By the time I got a job with the district in the early 90’s, the pricey hardrive was sitting in his office, out of service as a type of museum piece. Even in the mid-90’s we were using desktop computers with hundreds of times more capacity at a fraction of the cost. (I’m sure everyone in their 40’s and above have similar anecdotal stories.) Anyway, this $10k harddrive was about 3′ x 4′ (the simple metric would be 1 meter by 1 meter), and it had a varnished oak case. It looked like a piece of living room furniture! Reminds me of the audio furniture in the 60’s, when the stereo was a part of the living room and the size of a couch!

That photo will be replaced one day. The right photo will have the circuit board, the left photo will have a dot on a microscopic slide. I will criticize the photo though…the old should have been on the left, the new on the right.