Yup, even old computers that booted off floppy drives like the Atari ST and Amiga would often just load the entire data and program into memory, since their memory size was usually larger than the floppy disk. Same for the games, a lot of the loading at the beginning was to do with simply loading the entire disk into memory...
basically system memory size vs block device size was the opposite way around of today... then again people could and did have many individual floppy disks.
If we take any portable media as the comparison, the largest I know of is 50GB for a blueray disk, that’s still something you can ‘almost’ load into 32gb of memory (if your OS and Teams app didn’t take 16gb of course).
i have >100GB blu ray media, and that's writeable. So those exist. My BD-R from 2016 reads them correctly and can write them, so it's not some "recent" thing, except maybe the capability to create the media. I think the largest BD-R available are around 120GB.
Luckily, the gen 7 tapes are 10-100 times that large, depending on who you ask. Each disk costs approximately $2-$5 as well, assuming you get some sort of discount. Tapes are more, they hold more, but at a certain point having a disc in a jewel case is better than having some tape. bluray drives are easy to find, tape readers, not so much.
MicroSD cards - about the size of a fingernail - absolutely come in sizes up to 1TB, that's not controversial or dodgy brands selling fakes. There's many brands selling cards at 512GB, ten times your BluRay example.
Portable flash drives using M.2 drives internally could reasonably be up to 8TB, but being at the high end they're expensive.
Samsung is a reputable brand that makes 256 GB and 512 GB SD cards (EVO Plus) - I have good experience with using it in Raspberry Pi. And "thumb drives" - USB sticks absolutely go into TBs - I'm using a 2 TB one, and I've seen colleagues use bigger. And you can put a modern M.2 NVMe SSD into USB-C casing and it's half the size of an old portable SSD...
It’s maybe a bit big to call it a “thumb drive” but I’ve been putting backups on a 2TB usb “portable ssd”. I’ve also got a 256GB thumb drive, which isn’t too far off.
if you take a dvd (dvd5 or dvd9 either way) on a linux machine with ~16GB of memory, and you read the entire disk once - say dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/dev/null - the entire thing will be in memory. You can then use whatever tools you want as if you had the disk in memory, and it will never touch the physical device again.
If i hadn't seen it myself i would have wondered why it wasn't already possible already.
Old systems only ran one program at a time (basically).
So boot floppy for OS into RAM, then load program floppy(s). Do the thing, save work to yet another floppy. Close program, maybe have to re-insert an OS floppy (ala MS-DOS). Then new floppy for next program. Only a king a 20MB RLL drive.
That's right I owned an Atari STFM with 4MB of RAM.
As another example You could easily make RAM disks via a desktop menu, to facilitate the common setup of a single built in floppy drive. So you could copy files off into RAM via the GEM desktop GUI (literally drag and drop) and then put another disk in etc.
Random aside: I accidentally found that this machine would transmit audio over FM radio for a short but very useful range automatically.. blew my mind as a kid. I could never find anything official about this online later so not sure if it was an intentional design, poor EM design of the audio chip, or a hack of my particular 2nd hand franken-tari - either way it was super useful to have wireless audio in the 90s.
That’s really interesting, a quick search provided nothing about FM transmission capabilities.
The ”FM” officially stands for Floppy & (RF) Modulator, but that’s some coincidence that the audio chip emits frequency modulated radio waves at a listenable frequency.
One disk, sure. 30? Well, the parent made a very biased interpretation of history, depending on what one means by "old". I remember running Linux on a 4 MB RAM computer, and how good upgrading to 8 MB felt.
basically system memory size vs block device size was the opposite way around of today... then again people could and did have many individual floppy disks.