Time for a bit of history on storage drive development as I remember from my experiences in IT. Notwithstanding the famous picture of the 5MB hard drive that is being loaded into the cargo bay of a commercial jet aircraft, (and it just about fits). Hard drives became usable when they got the form factor down to the 8" Winchester. It then reduced to 5.25" with an AT interface that suited the very early PC and other system base architectures, small enough to fit into a desktop or tower case. A further reduction to 3.5" form factor became the norm for hard drives until the development of Solid State Drives (SSD)
Floppy Drives followed the same form factor sizes for the first floppy drives, 8", 5.25, then Sony developed the 3.5" form factor which first used a rigid plastic case for the disks. There was a rival though at the same time, Hitachi developed a 3" form factor drive which again used a rigid plastic cased disk, it had an advantage though in that the disks were double sided and could hold twice as much data that the 3.5" Sony. The main problem was the production costs, the Sony was cheaper to mass produce and in the quickly expanding PC market it won the race. Technically the Hitachi was a much better drive, considerably more robust and offered better storage options but it failed simply on cost.
The failure of the Hitachi drive was a bonus for a certain Mr Alan Sugar. who saw it as an opportunity to add to his latest venture in developing a complete office system at a budget price. This was the PCW series of machines which apart from the printer was completely built using redundant technology but sold very successfully as a complete office solution for lots of small businesses and individuals alike. The system comprised of a Grey or Green screen monitor which also contained the microprocessor, RAM, ROM and disk drives and power supplies. It came with a keyboard and a custom built (Epsom) dot matrix tractor printer. Alan Sugar bought the rights to a redundant CP/M Operating System and the microprocessor was a Z80 processor. Software supplied gave access to a version of BASIC and included the Locoscript Office Suite which gave the user access to a Word processor, Spreadsheet and Database programs. He bought the entire redundant stock of Hitachi 3" Drives which were used in the system. Later models flipped to using a 3.5" form factor drive when the 3" stocks ran out. The whole system was priced at about 2/3rds of the price of a comparable entry level PC. They came in 256 and 512MB variants. He sold hundreds of thousands of units. The early marketing ploy was a discount on the full retail price if the customer brought in a typewriter. We had dozens of them and when we asked what to do with them they said we just dump them! The deal gave you £100 discount off the retail price so you got the whole lot for £199.00
We ran all the invoicing for the TV firm I worked for instead of the previous ledger based and typewritten stuff which took the best part of a day to complete each week. I had a database with all the retail stock on including small stuff like the battery bar and lamp stocks that we carried. I had a separate database for the workshop stock of valves, transistors, IC's and passive components. It made stocktaking each year considerably easier.
