Did you really mean Nineteen-Eighty-Eight?

In PC Magazine from July 1988 there is an advert for a 15MHz XT for $575 with an optional 30MB Segate ST238 5.25" scsi hard drive inside for an extra $295 [0]

The price hasn't dropped much since, it's now $206 for the drive [1]

[0] https://archive.org/details/PC-Mag-1988-07-01/page/22/mode/2...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/ST238R-Seagate-3600RPM-Internal-Drive...

At Aph we had 10Mb drives in 1978.

In Winter 1987 I had an Amstrad PC1640HDMD with a 20MB MFM hard disk. I opened the case many times, the disk was just a 5.25 inch device, certainly not like 20 small refrigerators, or even one.

Bonus: I got an RLL controller and turned it into a 30MB hard disk! Couldn't believe it. But getting the interleaving right was time consuming..

I suspect that was really 1 GB?

3.5" HDs of over > 20 MB for IBM PCs were around in IBM PCs at the time.

OK, so I think memory was wrong on this. I found this online:

> In the 1980's we used 14 inch drives in our DEC VAX cluster. Each 14 inch drive had a capacity of about 450MB

Those platters were definitely the 14" size, and there was more than one of them in the refridgerator-sized unit. At this temporal distance, I can't guess what the overall size was anymore, but it was clearly not 1MB.

Sorry for the misleading post. Still, it was quite a day, regardless.

A single head? Amazing.