Good Egg Productions wrote:
Before platter hard drives, there were storage cards that would install into the motherboard like a video card or sound card. My dad had a work computer in the house with a 40MB hardcard. At the time, that was huge.
It's interesting to see how "expansion" cards are nearly obsolete except for the more hardcore users. Sound, video, communications and I/O are all built directly into the motherboards now. And as soon as cloud storage becomes ubiquitous, I imagine that we'll all just be using terminals without local storage at all on them.
I don't miss futzing with IRQ settings to get the damn 16 bit Turtle Beach sound card to work.
Or having TWO video cards in your computer, one for 2D rendering and a completely separate one for 3D graphics.
No, the "hard card" (an expansion card containing a disk controller + hard drive) came well after regular hard drives.
Disk controller cards were necessary for a long time, but they were wired to hard drives that were attached to the machine.
The first hard drive inside a PC was a 10MB drive in a PC XT - it was full-height 5 1/4 (same height as two normal optical drives). Before that, you could get external hard drives (I saw a 5MB external attached to a PC - it was quite large).
The PC XT had a card for the floppy drive, a card for the hard disk, and your choice of video card
I think MFM drives came next, and half-height 5 1/4 hard drives. Then ESDI and SCSI for people into large or fast hard drives. Full height and half height 5 1/4 hard drives co-existed, with full-height being more common for larger size drives.
You had to have an card in an expansion slot for all of these drives. ESDI and SCSI controllers were quite a bit more expensive, though. Still, if you went for the SCSI controller you had the option of attaching other SCSI peripherals, including tape drives.
I think my 386 had an 80MB ESDI drive, while my first 486 had an enormous 678MB SCSI drive. I even remember replacing that drive with my first 1GB drive (it was a Micropolis Ultra SCSI 2 drive).
I think IDE started to appear with later half-height hard drives, using a "paddle board" in an expansion slot (it was a simple card, because IDE was little more than the ISA bus extended). IDE became ATA (partly to allow support on things other than hard drives, like optical drives), which gave birth to SATA (just as SCSI went through several iterations to become SAS).
IDE was the first hard disk interface to be common on motherboards (there were a few motherboards with SCSI, but it was rare, and it was never part of a chip-set).
3.5" hard drives came along, at first beside 5.25" hard drives, and eventually replacing them. 2.5" hard drives came along later still.
I'm not sure exactly when "hard cards" appeared, but it was well after 3.5" hard drives - closer to the advent of 2.5" hard drives.
I have lost count of the number of times I have been asked "what will you put in all that space?"
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You could put two video cards into the first PC, but they controlled two different monitors (typically a text-only monochrome and a graphics-capable colour monitor).
The two-cards-one-monitor arrangement didn't last long - that was basically the brief life of the 3DFx Voodoo card and its sequel the Voodoo 2. At one point I had three cards to drive one monitor: a Matrox for regular work, and a pair of Voodoo 2 cards in Scan-Line-Interleave (the original SLI) mode for 3D.
