The computer revolution wouldn’t have hit as hard and as deep as it has if it weren’t for a cheap, fast, and dense storage media. Happy 50th birthday to the hard drive!
It was on Sept. 13, 1956, 50 years ago tomorrow, that IBM shipped its refrigerator-sized IBM RAMAC 650 HDD, which was a combination of a magnetic drum data processing machine and a series of disk memory units. The RAMAC’s disks were coated with magnetic iron oxide paint and had a total of 5Mbytes of storage capacity. These 5Mbytes were stored in 50 such disks, each of which was two feet in diameter.
At 2,100 pounds, this behemoth required several people to carry it onto a truck, according to eminent industry analyst Jim Porter, who is as much a legend in the HDD industry as the RAMAC 650 itself. The per-platter capacity of the RAMAC was a microscopic 100Kbytes and the whole product was priced at $7,000, which translates to about $1.4 million per gigabyte of storage.
Today I’ve got old 8-Mb SD cards that are too small to be useful, and you can buy “disposable” 16-Mb drives.
There’s an event today commemorating the anniversary at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA.
http://www.computerhistory.org/50yearsHDD-c/
My first hard drive was a 10Mb 5 1/4″ monster bought at the West Coast Computer Faire in S.F. I believe it was 1981 and it had the amazing seek time of 135 Ms.
Tom
I think you mean 7 million not 7000. Hell who reads this anyway.
Imagine what we will have in another 50 years.
Some time in the near future (maybe next spring) I plan on purchasing as NAS (probably the Infrant ReadyNAS RNV1) and filling it with four 750-1000 GB hard drives. This will give me enough storage for the time being. I wouldn’t be surprised if bought another NAS for future storage needs. You may be asking what could I have that would take up that much space. VIDEO.
I know a guy who was working at UMIST in the early ’50s when some of the research that led to hard drives was done. A few years ago his PC drive failed and was replaced. He dismantled the old one and said, almost tearfully ‘… the soldering was so tidy, you can’t solder that neatly’
Just one small way things have contributed to the progress I guess
I had an instructor who used to work for IBM and shared their secrect process for applying a very smooth application of the oxide material to the disk surface. IBM would place a “blob” of material into the center of the platter and then spin it, causing it to be distributed evenly and smoothly. This patented technique kept them in the lead for high-storage devices for many years. It was kept secrect for a long time — he felt it was safe to tell us since the patent had long ago expired.
I remember working on Navy equipment that had 5 platters, and there were no moving heads, instead having about 25 heads per platter with each one reading from one single track. The capacity was a couple of megabytes.
Which came first, the hard drive or the floppy disk? I still have some 160K 8 inch floppies somewhere. Formatted for CPM.
I remeber the first 9 GB hard drive I ever used. It was in the late 1980’s and it was the size of a full data center rack. It was bloody amazing. BTW, we where still using reel to reel magnetic tape too.
I bought my first (and last; everything since has been either a build-up or a rebuild) computer in ’94, it had a 135 MB hard drive, 4 MB’s of RAM and both 3.5 and 5.25 floppy drives. I was ready! I wasn’t exactly sure what I was ready for, but I was ready.
Looking at that picture, I can’t help but think how BIG the iPod it was destined for must have been! It probably had a tube amplifier too.
12AU7 with gold-plated pins from Radio Shack, ah those were the days…
You think your washing machine goes haywire when off balance? I remember 350mb minicomputer HDD going off balance and dancing across the floor!
Back at the University, our professor showed us a disc from an HD from the 60s, and it was one heck of a solid disc… nothing floppy about it. 🙂
I remember during the rollout of Windows 95. This store had an old (antique) 5 mg HD with the cover off. The platters were about 12” dia. The amazing thing was that you could see the individual tracks visually. They appeared the same as an old vinyl record. I don’t recall the age of the HD, but I do recall the individual tracks.
With limitations in hard disk memory of yesteryear the mind had to work harder in conciseness. I remember when file names had to be eight letters or less with an extension of three (DOS’ autoexec.bat, for example). Nowadays, with almost no limitations our brains are getting lazier while we depend more and more on file searching tools, and we clutter our drives with forgettable stuff. And backing up? I work in IT, almost no one does it.
I can’t believe it ! My laptop has 320gb hdd and a hdd like this costs less than 100 usd. Imagine how expensive would be one of those in ’50s.
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masini de inchiriat otopeni