Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?
I remember as a child one of my friends has a very old computer, even for the nineties. All of the programs had to be loaded on with 3.5" floppy disks each time we wanted to run them. There was a cargo ship management game that we messed with that I was too young to understand. I was really interested in “ballast” as cargo because it was zero cost; no wonder I didn’t make any money.
Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?
Real answer: yes, but also no. Depends on context.
Professionally, proper hard-disks go back before 8" floppies, let alone the 5.25" and their stiffer 3.5" counterparts. But those drives were comically oversized appliances (like rack-mount and even mini-fridge sized) compared to the stuff we have now.
For home-gamers, PCS have shipped with all three floppy formats shown above, at different times. Hard Drives start showing up for IBM PCs after they miniaturize to fit in the 5.25" drive bay form-factor. But all that’s just before the invention of the 3.5" floppy, and well ahead of it’s popularity as something that comes standard.
Was this before actual hard disk drives became popular?
I remember as a child one of my friends has a very old computer, even for the nineties. All of the programs had to be loaded on with 3.5" floppy disks each time we wanted to run them. There was a cargo ship management game that we messed with that I was too young to understand. I was really interested in “ballast” as cargo because it was zero cost; no wonder I didn’t make any money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ports_of_Call_(video_game) I think I found the game
Amazing! That’s exactly it!
I would be confident just based on the summary, but I remember that minigame where you pilot the boat in the harbor.
They were popular, just prohibitively expensive for very little storage.
I mean, at home we had HDDs long before 3.5" drives. And although paltry today, having 10, 20, and 40mb fses were really nice at the time
The first computers had one, sometimes two floppy drives, and zero hdds.
The first computers had neither
Real answer: yes, but also no. Depends on context.
Professionally, proper hard-disks go back before 8" floppies, let alone the 5.25" and their stiffer 3.5" counterparts. But those drives were comically oversized appliances (like rack-mount and even mini-fridge sized) compared to the stuff we have now.
For home-gamers, PCS have shipped with all three floppy formats shown above, at different times. Hard Drives start showing up for IBM PCs after they miniaturize to fit in the 5.25" drive bay form-factor. But all that’s just before the invention of the 3.5" floppy, and well ahead of it’s popularity as something that comes standard.