Hard Disk Drive turns 55

jsquareg · 05 Oct 2011

whs said:

The first one I worked with was an IBM 1311 (2 to 3MB) on an IBM 1440. That was in 1963 in the Time/Life building in NYC. You had to be aware of the rotational delay and program accordingly.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP1440.html

That takes me back. I was at Time Life (Product Test) about that time. A couple of years before the 'Black Out.'

whs · 05 Oct 2011

jsquareg said:

whs said:

The first one I worked with was an IBM 1311 (2 to 3MB) on an IBM 1440. That was in 1963 in the Time/Life building in NYC. You had to be aware of the rotational delay and program accordingly.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP1440.html

That takes me back. I was at Time Life (Product Test) about that time. A couple of years before the 'Black Out.'

We may have met. The Blackout was in Nov. 65. I was a guest for a couple of months coming from Paris. You must have been testing Compilers or Sort.

msdos622wasfun · 05 Oct 2011

kado897 said:

Larger amounts of data and transaction files were, in the 70's, stored on magnetic tape. I can even remember a product "database" stored on punched cards.

I've been meaning to catalog my CD collection that way.

jsquareg · 05 Oct 2011

whs said:

jsquareg said:

whs said:

The first one I worked with was an IBM 1311 (2 to 3MB) on an IBM 1440. That was in 1963 in the Time/Life building in NYC. You had to be aware of the rotational delay and program accordingly.

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainframe_PP1440.html

That takes me back. I was at Time Life (Product Test) about that time. A couple of years before the 'Black Out.'

We may have met. The Blackout was in Nov. 65. I was a guest for a couple of months coming from Paris. You must have been testing Compilers or Sort.

Yes, Fortran and, a little later, 360 OS performance. We may well have met. I do remember meeting a tall slim Frenchman in our office for a visit. :)

richnrockville · 05 Oct 2011

strollin said:

Technically, cassette BASIC was in ROM, BASICA (Advanced BASIC), which knew how to read/write disks, came with PC-DOS and relied on portions of code in ROM so it wasn't stand alone and only worked on IBM machines. MS-DOS came with GWBASIC (Gee Whiz BASIC) that could run on non-IBM machines that did not have the ROM BASIC.

I still use gwbasic in a cmd window on xp and 32bit version of windows 7 and 2008.
It has a problem with 64 bit..

Rich

Corazon · 05 Oct 2011

Gosh. My first contact with computers in general was a Philips Videopac 7000 in 1980, followed by a Commodore 64 in 1983. Y'all making me feel young.

biggles1000 · 05 Oct 2011

oh, it was 5 MEGAbytes originally! I must've misread it a while back in a book and it got lodged in my memory that it was 5 GIGAbytes... that would explain why I got confused seeing <5GB HDDs in computers in this best buy flyer that somebody dug up

whs · 06 Oct 2011

jsquareg said:

whs said:

jsquareg said:

That takes me back. I was at Time Life (Product Test) about that time. A couple of years before the 'Black Out.'

We may have met. The Blackout was in Nov. 65. I was a guest for a couple of months coming from Paris. You must have been testing Compilers or Sort.

Yes, Fortran and, a little later, 360 OS performance. We may well have met. I do remember meeting a tall slim Frenchman in our office for a visit. :)

That could not have been me. I was always chubby and I am German.