I had one of those multi-thousand dollar 10MB HDs, put in my Wang personal computer (that required an x86 compatibility board to be useful beyond word processing). Meh, it was pricey, but that's just what hard drives cost back then. If you needed it, you needed it (and probably had a legitimate business/tax-deductible use for it). If you didn't need it, you did without, because only rich people have that kind of disposable income to blow on HDs that cost as much as the computer.
Some of the early floppy disks had a surprisingly large amount of space. I think the Tandy 8 inch discs had around 1.2 MB, so in effect, your 10MB hard drive was only five (ok, four) times the space you could have available with a dual floppy setup.
By 1990 or so, 40MB hard drives were becoming available, and floppies had shrunk physically, but not gained much capacity.
I didnt have my own computer in 1990 yet :-). Finally got second hand C64 in 1992, then build myself a 386/4mb/40mb for under $200 from used parts in 1993. No VGA monitor, I had to use RGB cable connected to a TV and a software reprogramming CRTC timings to 15KHz.
You specifically wrote
>40MB hard drives were becoming available
which is not accurate. In 1990 Dell 425TE was shipping with a selection of "High-performance IDE (40MB. 80 MB. 100 MB, 190 MB) and ESDI (330 MB, 650 MB) hard disk drives.". Top configuration 650MB/color monitor/8MB ram $9600.
As a standard or low end option. I was thinking of a Mac SE/30 that probably came with 40 or 80MB hard drive. It was black & white, but on the other hand, it had a fast CPU and space for way more than 8MB RAM.
$9600 in 1990 is an absurd amount, even compared to Apple prices at the time. That is/was a new economy car price.
In any case, I didn't have any contact to speak of with PC compatibles until I went to college, only Amigas, Apples, and Macs.
