In Spring 1984 I was taking a course on Linear Algebra and in my spare time (trying to avoid rush hour traffic so I stayed at the school) I went to the computer center when it was not busy and began writing some programs in Apple Pascal to manipulate matrices - those with integer elements. I wanted to be able to calculate determinants and other useful things, and keep my programming skills fresh. During that semester the center had gotten a Corvus Hard Drive and had networked all the Apple IIe computers to it. I have a vague recollection they also had a VCR for backup, but never saw it in operation.

I got an account on the hard drive and it was sure nice to be able to load programs and data from the hard drive and not floppy disks. But I managed to crash the hard drive one day.

My Apple Pascal programs had a lot of procedures and includes and when it came time to compile, the floppy drive would be accessed very often. So using the hard drive, even over a network, was much faster. The day the Corvus crashed, I realized that the Apple IIe did not have the entire compiled program in memory, most of the program was still on the Corvus. So every time a procedure was called the request would go over the network to the Corvus, and as other students would be in the center also accessing the drive, but not as much as my program, the Corvus got overwhelmed.

I had written a little procedure for validating every keystroke because I had to use strings, the Apple Pascal integer input routine would hang if a non-integer character was pressed. That little validation routine had to be called from the server for every key press, and so when entering a matrix, that's a lot of network hits.

Once I had realized what a disaster the program was on the network, I quietly stopped my work that day and never wrote another program to run on the network. Also, my other schoolwork and job were loading me up so I did not have time for programming any longer. I also realized that microcomputer programming languages had a long way to go before they would be ready for bigger projects. Memory was so expensive that the small processors like the 6502 maxed out was still a whopping lot of money.

Four years later I bought a CompuAdd 286 computer with a 20 megabyte hard drive, 4 banks of 256K memory, an EGA monitor, and a printer for $2000. All that for less than that Corvus cost.

Electronic and mechanical technology still advances, more function for less money.

Personally, the first computer I had with a hard drive is a still-running 8088 that had 1, then later 2, 20MB Seagate ST-225s. I remember being almost ashamed when I managed to fill one up.