Portable computing!

By Sunday April 29, 2007

IBM 5mb Hard Drive circa 1956

Thanks, Joshua



13 Comments
  1. D Lee says:
    4/29/2007 at 5:36 am

    After a night drinking, I once ate a 64MB SD card on a dare. I wonder how long it would take to consume the equivalent memory in 1956 drives?

  2. gquaglia says:
    4/29/2007 at 5:36 am

    Amazing considering I have a 2in, 1 gig thumb driving sitting on my desk.

  3. Jägermeister says:
    4/29/2007 at 5:42 am

    I guess swapping music and movies wasn’t really common back then… but hey, it could contain IBMs whole collection of character pr0n… 😉

  4. bill says:
    4/29/2007 at 7:28 am

    PAA rest in peace.

  5. BubbaRay says:
    4/29/2007 at 7:44 am

    I still have a functional Hawk hard disk drive — 5Mb fixed, 5Mb removable. Cartridges larger than dinner plates and 3 in. thick. Not quite as large as the drive in the photo. Anyone remember the IBM 2311?

    http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/2311.html

  6. BubbaRay says:
    4/29/2007 at 8:51 am

    #6, Comment by brucemlloyd — 4/29/2007 @ 8:02 am

    I remember the ol’ days also, as a System 360/Model 40 systems analyst and operator for EDS. 256K of core memory, the big time !! I miss the flashing lights on the giant CPU…

  7. Esteban says:
    4/29/2007 at 9:33 am

    Do you think that thing works with External SATA?

  8. Rob says:
    4/29/2007 at 11:12 am

    You know what’s really ironic? After looking at that picture, I bet it was much easier getting that beast onto a plane back then, than it is to get a modern 2.5″ hard drive past the airport gestapo onto a plane today?

  9. TJGeezer says:
    4/29/2007 at 4:11 pm

    When I was about 10 my dad took me to the Calif. State Fair, where we stood in line to get into an Air Force semitrailer in which they were running nothing less than an actual Univac computer.

    It took up most of the space in the trailer, the rig was followed around by a jeep pulling a diesel motor-generator set for power in the field, and it had not one but three air conditioning units attached. It was awesome!

    It got me so interested, I saved up some money and bought a kit from Scientific American (source of most of my science education between ages 10 and 18) – it was a little logic device with pegboard, small lights, wires, switches and batteries to hook up. Point was to demonstrate simple logic functions. Too long ago now to be sure, but I it was called it a Geniac. Or some portmanteau name like that.

    Neither the Univac nor my homebuilt Geniac needed no stinkin’ 5MB honkin’ huge hard drive. We used switches and we liked it that way. Gawd that was a long time ago.

  10. BubbaRay says:
    4/29/2007 at 6:33 pm

    #10, TJGeezer, did you have one of these? It was pretty cool.

    http://www.computermuseum.li/Testpage/Digicomp-Kit-1963.htm

    Darnit, I hate posting so late, maybe someone will read this.

  11. max rubin says:
    4/29/2007 at 7:44 pm

    See how spoiled we are – bloated code and 500 gigabyte drives.
    They went to the moon on 8 k.
    There is not a furor over Microsoft Vista since most computer users use their high powered computers as “solitaire machines”
    There is great pride in their voice as they tell you this …. really

  12. Stevie G says:
    4/30/2007 at 5:08 am

    Did it come with USB 2.0 support? 😛


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