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Tales: When storage was huge Video

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Tales: When storage was huge
Created: 10/22/2007
Video description: See the amazing old Xerox storage devices of the 1970s, built to suit mountain trolls, in this episode of Tales of Silicon Valley.

Tales: When storage was huge Video Transcript

>> Silicon Valley is full of stories. Some pretty, some not. This is one of those stories. Bruce Damer, curator of the digibar shows the gigantic storage devices used by the Xerox alto to store data for mountain trolls.

>> You would pop this in there, this front would open, you would pop it in, and your entire alto environment would come up. So this is like a flash drive in a sense. And you.

>> Keychain drive.

>> That's right, keychain drive. You can take it anywhere on the net. The altos are running in the basement of the Whitehouse, they're running at CMU, they're running at Clark, all through Arpanet; you can play Maze war, a 3D first person shooter on this, across the Arpanet and you push this in there and it was your entire environment.

>> It's a USB drive, 1975.

>> Look for more tales of Silicon Valley at cnettv.com

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