Hard-Disk Drive Hits 50th Year

[banana republican]

While the personal computer turned 25 this year, 2006 marks another auspicious technological birthday: the 50th anniversary of the hard-disk drive. That is the storage device that makes possible not only PCs, but also iPods, TiVos and other consumer technology must-haves.

The first disk drive, called the RAMAC, was created by International Business Machines Corp. engineers in San Jose, Calif., in 1956. We talked with Currie Munce, research vice president for Hitachi Global Storage Technologies, whose parent company, Hitachi Ltd., acquired IBM's storage business where Mr. Munce's father also had worked.

The disks on it were 24 inches in diameter. The whole unit weighed over a ton, and had to be delivered on forklifts and loaded on to large cargo bays of airplanes. You had only five megabytes of storage. That's about five minutes worth of MP3 music.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB115619646188341474.html?mod=DCO

[William769]

1. We've come a long way baby!

[meldroc]

2. Heh, I remember stories of walking disk drives...

Back in the days when hard disk drives were the size of washing machines, and always on spin cycle, enterprising hackers would program the heads to move in a pattern that caused the drive to literally scoot across the floor. It also happened by accident in some cases. I remember one story about a walking disk drive that ended up blocking the door to one company's computer room, and they had to call the fire department to rip a hole in the wall so they could get in...

[karlrschneider]

3. When I started working with computers in the early 70s we had

"Hawk" hard drives about the size of a washing machine. They had one 'fixed' disk and one removable one, each with a whole 10 megabytes capacity! We rigged them up to a Data General 'mini' 16 bit
"CPU" that was as large as a refrigerator. It had 16K of real 'core' (the little ferrite beads)
on a big circuit board. I wrote payroll, accounting and work-progress programs on the thing using FORTRAN of all things! About a year ago, the guy who owned the small 'computer company' back then
called me and said he would give me several of those systems if I wanted them. I admit it would be
kind of fun to play around with them but I have no place to put the stuff! :D

[sdfernando]

6. I remember those!

My 1st real job was as a field tech for Wang Laboratories in the early 80s. Those drive were huge, and the big 300mg 9 platter drives were even bigger! Hated when I had to align the heads (18 total) on those things. Plug in the tech card, hook up an o-scope and hope you didn't 1)crash the head, 2) scratch the platter, 3) electrocute yourself on the voice-coil! ahhh fun times!

edited for bad spelling and grammar

[acmejack]

7. And the IBM units with the Heads built into the Disk Pack!

Talk about high dollar! We used a lot of CDC units with Five 14" platters for 780 Meg capacity too. Ah those were the days. The computational power I have on my desk would (and did) fill a big, big room.

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

4. Ohhhhh.... I feel old....

LOL :toast:

[NNN0LHI]

5. The one in this machine will be 9 years old in December

Knock on wood.

Don

[Lady Effingbroke]

8. Brief vid of RAMAC in action (no sound).

RAMAC!

[Deja Q]

9. And when a hard drive gets old, there's no e-Viagra to keep it up.

And the crash ain't pretty either.