Of course, you can buy a 256GB flash-based SSD right now for under $180. Yep, that’s a 494 followed by six zeroes. Amusingly, at that vintage price rate - about $1,930 per megabyte - a 256 GB SemiDisk SSD would cost over $494 million today. That’s about $3,860 today when adjusted for inflation. The 2 megabyte SemiDisk for the IBM PC retailed for $1,795 in 1985. All of them used solid-state RAM chips to achieve read and write speeds far beyond those of rotating platter drives at the time. The company behind this early SSD, SemiDisk Systems, sold a wide range of “disk emulators” (as they were called back then) for platforms like S-100 bus systems, the TRS-80 Model 2, and the IBM PC. Claus, a programmer working for Microsoft, wrote a 16-bit Windows-based 'emulator' for the Altair and IMSAI 8080-based computers as a desktop toy more than a usable emulation. From that experience, I learned that SSDs, as a product class, were far older than most people realize.Ĭase in point: Seen here is an advertisement for a 1985-era SSD called the SemiDisk. Emulator of Altair 8800 Computer In 1999, I (Rich Cini) downloaded a copy of a MITS Altair emulator program written for the Windows platform by Claus Giloi. Back in January, I traced the evolution of the Solid State Drive from its 1978 origins to the present in a PC World slideshow.
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