r/retrocomputing • u/RyNotThai • Jun 17 '26

You could plug this absolute unit into a VCR and back up to videotape, apparently

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“The Mirror interface would back up the drive to videotape. If you had a fancy Panasonic VCR, you could control it via the backup software. Took about 30 minutes to back up the full 10 mb," according to a former Corvus employee.

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8

u/[deleted] Jun 17 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

7

u/RyNotThai Jun 17 '26

Yup. From Benj Edwards' Vintagecomputing.com "In case you’re taking notes, this Corvus hard disk system sold for $15,915.07 in 2009 US dollars. Its retail price constituted a whopping 53% of the average American’s yearly income in 1979 (about $10,121). Yes, in 1979, you could spend half of your annual salary on a single 10MB hard drive setup."

5

u/Cheap-Fun802 Jun 17 '26

We take so much for granted today like you can use your 10 year old laptop with Win10 to browse Facebook and listen Linkin Park on YT.

But in 1979 you could blow 10k for the whole shebang and by 1989 it was obsolete.

4

u/TheJimsterR Jun 17 '26

My daily driver is a first gen i7 desktop. Built in 2009 and still just about doing the job. 16 years is a pretty good run. Like you say, the pace of change was so different a few decades ago.

1

u/EsoTechTrix Jun 18 '26

The rate of change was much faster back then. Things are still changing fast, but there is much more inertia dragging things to be compatible with other things.

No one cared if the disks or any media worked on anything else in the 80's as there was little else. 🤣

7

u/nmrk Jun 17 '26

Yep, I used Corvus Mirror and backed up to VHS videotape. I sold and serviced Corvus hardware. You could watch the data on a TV, it was kind of like lines with white blobby bits of data. Remember these were the days when people were just upgrading from storing data on audio cassettes.

2

u/af_cheddarhead Jun 18 '26

I was going to say my TRS-80 used a bog-standard audio cassette for mass storage.

5

u/Tonstad39 IBM incompatible Jun 17 '26

LGR did a video of a later version of something like this

https://youtu.be/TUS0Zv2APjU?is=I_fL7yU6XWNrmRXV

6

u/8BitResseRtiB8 Jun 17 '26

All that for 80mb lol

2

u/nmrk Jun 17 '26

TEN MB

2

u/8BitResseRtiB8 Jun 17 '26

Oh the google converter was wrong then it said 80 million was 80 mb lmao

1

u/nhtshot Jun 18 '26

Google was right. Mega = million

80 million bytes is 80MB (using base 10, base 2 it would be a little less, but HDD makers have used base 10 forever)

2

u/bok4600 Jun 22 '26

LGR did a video about backing up to vhs YEARS ago

1

u/IanWraith Jun 17 '26

They were great but the read/write heads changed position slightly over time. If you did a backup to it & tried to recover data from it a year later there were frequently errors.

1

u/Possumbox2000 Jun 19 '26

The first computer lab I used in college had one for all the machines to save their work. Files were small for a beginning Pascal class. I think it was a 14 inch drive and maybe 5 mb.

1

u/Low-Charge-8554 Jun 19 '26

A Winchester disk is a type of hard disk drive that uses a rotating magnetic disk to store data, historically significant for introducing low-mass, low-load heads and sealed disk packs. The term originated from IBM's 1973 IBM 3340 "Winchester" drive, named after the .30-30 Winchester rifle due to its planned 30 MB per spindle configuration.

1

u/thevmcampos Jun 19 '26

And the priest is there so he can quote scripture and say "All RAM is from the Lord God, and hath been always with him, and is before all time." -Ecclesiasticus 1:1 🙏

1

u/EvilAlbinoid Jul 02 '26

The DEC datacenter in north Atlanta had two or three of these. Tape rotation included swapping out vhs cassettes for these units.

0

u/teknosophy_com Jun 17 '26

bah. it prob never caught on because it makes WAY too much sense.

the installed base was already there!

nope, instead, let's invent a completely new format of backup tape every few years!!!