Re: Bosses shouldn't touch stuff...
I've heard stories like this before, and I have to ask whether that was true. Not so much for a 300 MB disk, as I can see how that would look pretty large compared to files, but people who express similar sentiments with 5-20 MB drives. I know I'm demonstrating my relative youth, a serious blow to my standing in this community, but did anyone who got such a disk really think it would be hard to fill that?
I'm going to answer this in a somewhat indirect way.
You've grown up with nothing but large HDD's and iPods etc and are thinking in terms of storing all of your data on it and nothing else. These days the only external storage you might have kicking around at home is DVD's for videos, but even then streaming is probably as common nowadays.
We grew up with zero HDD capacity and large libraries of 160kb 5.25" floppies, or 720kb 3.5" discs with the occasional double high density 3.5" floppy disk 1.44BM. This was quite natural since you did the same with cassette tapes for audio and VCR's for video.
Now I wasn't working, but I was doing something just as difficult in the day; gaming. This was not a "plug and play" experience, by any stretch of the imagination. I didn't start off with an HDD at all. You had everything on different floppy discs, some with applications, some with data and some with games. Getting a soundcard, joystick and mouse to work required cramming all their drivers on a single floppy bootdisc (occasionally along with the game) and then very precisely juggling the order in which they all loaded to into both the PC's base and extended memory to get everything to fit in the (very limited) available memory and still run.
We got very, very good at using every single last bit (if you'll forgive the pun) of space. For instance, many of us had custom edited the drivers and other software to only have the things in it that it really needed; for instance you didn't need the full OS, or the full drivers in many cases as they included the files for every possible configuration and you could ruthlessly prune these down to what is absolutely REQUIRED to fit a 720kb floppy and still run.
Now hand that same person with those space management habits a 40MB HDD. The space did appear limitless. And it was always there without needing to change floppies. Now we understood full well that you could fill that space; just shoving all of my files on it would probably have done it. However, our data had been living on removable storage for as long as anybody could remember and there was literally no reason to move it all to an HDD.
Given our extremely ruthless attitude towards wasted space (ie; habitually wiping out two thirds of an OS and drivers) i'd used about 25MB of my 40MB HDD in the several years before I was offered an upgrade to an 80MB HDD.
Just for general reference I declined that offer expressing an opinion that a larger disc was for people who couldn't learn how to manage their file space properly. :)
(Instead I think I was given a first generation 1x speed external CD ROM and some old data stayed on removable storage for literally years)