10 MB hard disk from the 1960s

[Tanuki]

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[underpants]

1. This where we store grandma's recipe for green bean casserole

[lapfog_1]

2. A previous generation storage unit

Also could be quite deadly...

[lunamagica]

13. What is that?

[lapfog_1]

14. That would be a drum storage unit

10 to 100KB. Every wire going to the drum supported a read or write "head"... so every track around the drum had it's own set of read/write spots... no seeks, and very little rotational latency.

Canister disk drives used to mimic this by "full tracking" the bottom surface of the bottom platter in a stack of platters. The read/write heads were placed like you see in this drum. Very useful for memory swap operations.

At the Univ. of Arizona, one drum storage unit froze up a bearing which caused the entire drum cylinder to break loose and smash through the enclosure, it continued wreaking havoc in the computer room until it reached the wall, it through the wall and into the parking lot 1 story down where it wrecked a number of cars before coming to a halt. Fortunately no one was hurt (I believe).

[lunamagica]

15. Wow, I had no idea. That was one complex piece of machinery. It must have weighted a ton to cause

so much damage.

Thank you lapfog. It's a good day when you learn something new, and today I did.

[MrModerate]

19. That's a heckuva hard drive crash. n/t

[steve2470]

22. wow talk about not backing up your data lol

Great story, thank you!

[unc70]

3. Still have working ones that size with only 2MB

I sort of have my own computer museum, most of it in storage. I have a couple of systems that use disks with platters that size that were still working the last time I powered them up. Have about 50 systems, software, work on national and international standards, and much more.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

4. Happy 61st birthday, yesterday, the moving-head hard disk drive.

The IBM 305 RAMAC was the first commercial computer that used a moving-head hard disk drive (magnetic disk storage) for secondary storage. The system was publicly announced on September 14, 1956, with test units already installed at the U.S. Navy and at private corporations. RAMAC stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control", as its design was motivated by the need for real-time accounting in business.
....

The original 305 RAMAC computer system could be housed in a room of about 9 m (30 ft) by 15 m (50 ft); the 350 disk storage unit measured around 1.5 square metres (16 sq ft). The first hard disk unit was shipped September 13, 1956. The additional components of the computer were a card punch, a central processing unit, a power supply unit, an operator's console/card reader unit, and a printer. There was also a manual inquiry station that allowed direct access to stored records. IBM touted the system as being able to store the equivalent of 64,000 punched cards.

[Jarqui]

5. In the late 70s

a disk like that (maybe up to 100MB) or 64K (note the K - not MB or GB) RAM for example cost $80,000-$200,000 roughly.

You had to be careful how many lines of code you sent to the processor, take that result and send a bunch more lines of code with for another result.

Times have certainly changed.

[Dale Neiburg]

6. I remember those well.

My boss at the time broke a number of bones in his foot when the drive fell on him -- from a height of about three inches. It weighed about as much as your average bathtub.

[hibbing]

7. Flash drives

I saw something posted the other day about flash drives that was funny. I don't remember the exact details, but the guy bought some flash drives recently and if he would have bought them like 10 years ago, for as much space it would have cost $128,000.

Peace

[Benny19851]

8. And now..

...We have micro-SD cards that can store 512 GB of info. It's incredible how technology has changed. Thank you for sharing!

[keithbvadu2]

9. 1986 / 1987 Tandy computer

[tymorial]

27. I still have my commodore 64

Complete with tape reader and disk drive. It still works. I have an old television that I keep around when I want to boot the thing up

[keithbvadu2]

10. 1989

?token=fcL5R9SOOOgDkmRSj79JDpybOoE%3D

[hunter]

11. My first job in the computer industry was for a place...

... that was still occasionally servicing washing-machine sized hard drives.

At first I thought it was cool suiting up for the clean room; look at me, I'm future man!

That wore off pretty quick.

Soon I was thinking, damn these hard drives and why the hell is anyone still using them???

That was one of the weirder jobs I ever had. It was in a huge factory, on an open floor that was three quarters abandoned. Parts of the factory floor were dark and littered with wreckage. The glamorous mainframe industry of the 'fifties, sixties, and early 'seventies was dying.

[LeftInTX]

12. I didn't know they had 10 MB discs back then

I thought it was all in KBs

[eppur_se_muova]

16. Inflation is out of control. A megabyte went so much further back then ! nt

[Angleae]

17. IBM 5MB hard drive being loaded on an airplane 1956.

[lastlib]

20. I showed a much younger co-worker this picture once....

He asked me if they could store music on it.

(I explained to him that it was a major achievement several years later when they learned how to digitize pictures for the space program.)

[Dave Starsky]

21. It might be the same as this one. 5MB, 1956.

[mahatmakanejeeves]

29. Odd. There's no car in that picture newer than the mid- to late-1940s, AFAICT. NT

[MrModerate]

18. I was still babysitting these . . .

Into the early 80s. Does anyone remember Wang, the gods of corporate word processing?

[steve2470]

24. I do, but never used it nt

[steve2470]

23. so ironic that in 1978, I hated computers so much I vowed never to take another class in it.....

Now I love them. Ah, progress and evolution of personality!

Good story, thank you.

[steve2470]

25. 1978 cutting-edge computer from Radio Shack

[tymorial]

26. I have a couple of hard drives from the early 90s

They had a capacity of 40meg. I use them as bookends 😃

[CentralMass]

28. In the mid 80's i had a temp postion at one of Digital Equipments disk drive devopment facilites

in Massachusetts. The group was designing new read/write head. They would produce the heads with several different mfg techniques including "laser enhanced chemical etching". Part my job was to measure the geometries of the heads with tools like a optical comparators and stylus profilometers, and profilometer that used interferometry.

We tested how well the heads flew using a peice of test equipent called a flying height tester. The tester used a glass mockup of the disk with top and bottom mounted read/write heads. A monochromatic light source was focused on the heads and an interferometer was used to measure the distance between the head and the spinning disk below by using it to analyze the reflected light between the disk and the head.

[DFW]

30. More stolen items from King Tut's tomb, I see........ n/t