Throwback Thursday: “High capacity storage system”

Ahhh, those were the days. If your wallet was full of cash or you had a decent amount of available credit on your credit card, you could pick up one of these babies — a “ten plus megabyte” Macbottom hard drive for your Mac 128K or 512K. All you had to do is call 1-800-MACBUTT (I am not making this up) to order one.

Not only did this device offer tons of storage, but it was faster than a floppy drive. You either plugged it into your printer or modem port, and it would load your favorite business apps in minutes! Macbottom sat right under your Mac, foreseeing today’s products like the NewerTechnology miniStack Max that sits under a Mac mini. And it only weighed “less than five pounds”!

While I wasn’t able to find a price tag for one of these drives anywhere in the October 1985 MacUser that this ad came from (it was listed in various places as “Please Call for Price”), similar drives were running anywhere from $1,099 – $1,249. Yes, about $110 per megabyte. Consider that you can now buy a 1 terabyte USB 3.0 external hard drive for about $50 or about $0.00005 per megabyte, and that that drive is not only bus-powered, but also weighs a scant six ounces.

My first hard drive was purchased about this time — an Apple HD-20 that cost me $1,495 for 20 megabytes of storage. I was the envy of my friends! 

If you recall slow, expensive, and low-capacity hard drives as well as I do, share your memories in the comments.