1989:
The IBM 3390 Direct Access Storage Device series was introduced > November 1989> , offering a maximum storage of up to 22 gigabytes. Cost of a storage system varied by configuration and capacity, between $90,000 and $795,000.
Now:
I don’t relate so much to memory capacity…but what a difference 37 years makes:
My first “computer”: an IBM Mag card typewriter introduced in 1973 with an 8000 character memory. Two of us in the FBI’s San Diego field office secretarial pool got these. Lucky me.
Susan
The hard drive in my first computer, a PC-XT was a whopping 10 megabites!
Had a pertinent conversation just this weekend with an old college friend:
I did my undergrad work from '88 - '92, and entered college with a typewriter; if I needed a computer, I went to the computer lab at school. I finally bought a Mac Classic (I think) for my senior year: it didn’t have a hard drive, but rather had two 3.5" floppy disk drives. I was forever swapping out disks while running programs (“Please insert Disk 2. Please insert Disk 3. Please insert Disk 1” . . . over and over). Cramped little black-and-white screen. The thing cost me something like $1600, too! You can get a pretty loaded laptop nowadays for that kind of scratch.
The fellow I spoke with this weekend also bought a Mac during his senior year, but his had (if our memories served) a 20 (possibly 40?) megabyte – not gigabyte – hard drive. And we all made fun of him at the time: “How could anyone possibly need that much memory? What ridiculous overkill!”
And now I’ve got an iPod with 80 gigabytes of memory in my pocket. Times change, indeed.
(Along with that Mac and its floppy drives, I also bought a dot-matrix printer. Boy, could a guy make himself popular in the dorms by printing out a draft paper at 2:00 a.m. with that thing. What a racket. And ah, the days of tearing off those two little perforated rows running down the side of each page, and having to tear the pages apart from one another from that one never-ending strip. Hey, how long was your essay? “Oh, about seventeen feet…”)
And uphill to school every day, through the snow. On the way home, too.
LOL Back in the day my best friend was very excited to receive what must have been one of these Sinclair “home” computers. I’m pretty sure it was this model but it may have been one without that extended back thingy behind the keyboard. Either way it looked a lot like this one and it was the same brand. It had a blistering 4K of ram and an external cassette drive and was hooked up to an old 1960s or 70s B&W TV.
Warning: slight tangent.
I had a volunteer post at a hospital for a while in the data processing department. It started out as rudimentary data entry for a special program the hospital ran that would give members discounts. We entered patient info into the system, etc. They canceled that program and our duties shifted:
They used to use dot matrix printers but had long since replaced them. They still had reams and reams of the paper, though, so they had taken to making notepad out of them. To do this required that every sheet be separated and every feed strip be pulled. So, suddenly my volunteer post in data processing became all about taking boxes and boxes of old dot matrix paper, pulling off the feed strips, and separating every page.
We knew we were in trouble when we ran out of paper to tear… they “laid us off” the following week (can you lay off a volunteer?).
My first computer. Radio Shack TRS-80. No hard drive, no floppy drive. Cassette tape interface. 16KB of RAM which I upgraded to 32K, making me the hottest jock on the block for about 2 weeks.
my first:
apple ][+..pretty sure it had 16K of memory. One disk drive.
My first was a Wang personal computer.
My father programmed Wang mainframes,
and somehow this translated into a free
used Wang PC that a customer wasn’t
using anymore.
It had a green&black monochrome screen.
We also had a daisy wheel printer that had
a glass cover to muffle the incredible sound
made by the print head’s impact (think M-16,
but slower).
It didn’t do much, so I learned Basic.
It’s probably low on the archaity metrics, but
high on the obscurity-meter (and the funny
name scale).
we really thought we were something when we got a HP 1000 in the lab in 1986. We were running 24 instruments off of it (all with A/D boxes, of course).
Mmmm, storage envy - 1 terrabyte!!! 
I still have the first hard drive I ever bought. It is a 20 MB external drive for an Atari 1024ST. It cost me $900.00 at the time.
I still have the Atari, too. It blew the Mac of the time right out of the water, and left the PC so far behind as to not be a consideration. I have never forgiven Atari for dumping us users.
Frankly, I don’t know what to do with it now. I managed to sell my Apple IIe. I guess if you look hard enough there’s a market for just about anything.
djm
So much room, you don’t know what to do with the rest..
is the soundtrack to every advance in storage capacity.
~~
My first was a Franklin ACE, an Apple clone. It had no hard disk at all; I spent days swapping floppies.
Although my first programming experience involved colouring in a new card for every line of BASIC, to be read by what was alleged to be a Wang mainframe. The other class got to learn on the new Commadore Pets. I still feel ripped off.
My first computer - well not mine personally, our high school - Digital PDP-8/i, 1969:
No mass storage as I recall, only paper punch tape on a Teletype ASR-33 terminal:
You’d walk away from every programming session covered in a yellow confetti of punch tape chads. Or avoid that by programming octal machine code directly into the CPU via the rocker switches. It also came with a BASIC interpreter and Fortran compiler.
My first personally-owned PC (after a Sinclair ZX-81, and a shared Kaypro 286i) was a Compaq 386s in 1989. The factory upgrade from the default 10 MB drive to the whopping 40 MB drive cost around $1000, for a total cost of around $5K.
My first computer was a Mac SE, and my business partner and I went all out and got the 40MB HD option. I have no idea what we paid for the whole sh’bang, laserwriter and all, but it was a bundle.
In about '94 or so as I recall, I bought a 540MB external drive, and it was roughly $500. At that rate, my iMac’s drive would have set me back about $320,000!
I had an Atari ST. I still miss it.
I still have my KSR-33 (the KSR Model is like the ASR-33 only without the paper punch unit), I used to connect it to my Commodore 64 through a 2N2222 Transistor to do printouts back in 1984.
Wrote a BBS program once for the Commodore in basic with an online adventure game.
I worked at a company that had a PDP-11/45 running RSTS/E operating system. They had the big removable multi-platter 33 MB Drive units. About the size of a kitchen oven floor unit, one day I was pushing one of those spare units down the hallway to the storage room and a forklift come crashing through the door way and hit the drive unit and it hit me - it sounds funny today saying that I got struck by a disk drive on wheels - but it hurt!
I also have one of those tube powered Western Union Fax Machines - prints on 4" wide special conductive paper.
It makes me laugh to be reminded of punch cards. A woman I knew found herself swept up in the terror of Y2K in the late 90s as there was suddenly this great need for keypunch operators. It was the only legitimate job she’d ever had in her life, and she was quite good at it, apparently. It was quite an adjustment for her to go back to work among the straights for a while. 
Good money for her while it lasted, though.
djm
Speaking of punch card computing …
I work for a software company founded in 1978*. Their original (and still flagship) product is an FEA simulation software package called Abaqus. Back in the day, the model and simulation information was entered (as was everything) on punch cards. One card for node information, another for Element definitions, another for Materials, etc. A deck of these cards defined your complete model.
Of course, that method of input has long since been replaced with a standard text file, but we still call them “input decks”, and the associated data pieces “cards”.
Oh, the anachronism of it all …
*Couldn’t resist the opportunity for a ‘plug’: The company is D’Assault Systemes Simulia Corp., formerly Abaqus, Inc., formerly Hibbitt, Karlsson and Sorensen, Inc. www.simulia.com
My first computer was a woman mathmatican my mother knew who had worked for NACA, loads of memory but difficulty with function applications such as anything to do with everyday life. Apparently she was scrapped at the end of the war, a shame really as she had no business being subjected to the real world.
My first attempt at teaching scripting was to tell a group of women they’d have to remember to conf their titties. It took another hour to explain my way out of hot water. 
djm