Hard Disk Drive turns 55

strollin said:

richnrockville said:

Some early hard disks were referred to as "winchester" disks. ...Rich

Winchester was the project name for the IBM 3340 disk drive. It was so-named because each of it's 2 disk packs could hold 30MB of data making it a 30-30, just like a Winchester rifle.

I have one of those. Not the disk drive but a Winchester 30-30. Sweet rifle.

Jim

I remember when 4 GB was the hot thing lol I was maybe 8 years about and I was still messen with my dads 386 which still worked up till last year!

msdos622wasfun said:

I can't even imagine what they would have stored on those things back then. I mean, today, 5 MB doesn't hold much, unless you're talking about the phone numbers and addresses of all your customers and not much else, so if you were a large business, wouldn't that pretty much eat up all that space just for that purpose? A Word document with the word "Hello" takes up 12.3 KB of space. In 5 MB, you could store roughly 400 of those.

Yes, but things are different today with WYSIWYG graphics in Word and such. Back then everything was plain text so 5M could hold lots more data.

msdos622wasfun said:

I can't even imagine what they would have stored on those things back then. I mean, today, 5 MB doesn't hold much, unless you're talking about the phone numbers and addresses of all your customers and not much else, so if you were a large business, wouldn't that pretty much eat up all that space just for that purpose? A Word document with the word "Hello" takes up 12.3 KB of space. In 5 MB, you could store roughly 400 of those.

This lack of space of course was the reason for the Y2K problem. Every byte mattered.

kado897 said:

msdos622wasfun said:

I can't even imagine what they would have stored on those things back then. I mean, today, 5 MB doesn't hold much, unless you're talking about the phone numbers and addresses of all your customers and not much else, so if you were a large business, wouldn't that pretty much eat up all that space just for that purpose? A Word document with the word "Hello" takes up 12.3 KB of space. In 5 MB, you could store roughly 400 of those.

This lack of space of course was the reason for the Y2K problem. Every byte mattered.

That's true but I think it was more due to not having excess core memory for running programs rather than disk space that made it so programmers only used 2 digits to express the year. The mainframe computers back then had far less memory than the average desktop (heck, most phones have more memory) of today.

Corazon said:

I remember having an Amiga 500 with two floppy drives (one internal, one external). One day I got my first-ever harddrive...a whopping 85MB Quantum SCSI. I was blown away by the 900KB/sec transfer speed!

And I didn't have a CD writer (I did get a CD-ROM drive later, for hundreds of $...it was a top-of-the-line quad-speed) or a tape backup station, so I made my backups to floppy disks.

My first HD had 10 MB of space. A lot of space in those years (25 / 28 years ago)...

strollin said:

kado897 said:

msdos622wasfun said:

I can't even imagine what they would have stored on those things back then. I mean, today, 5 MB doesn't hold much, unless you're talking about the phone numbers and addresses of all your customers and not much else, so if you were a large business, wouldn't that pretty much eat up all that space just for that purpose? A Word document with the word "Hello" takes up 12.3 KB of space. In 5 MB, you could store roughly 400 of those.

This lack of space of course was the reason for the Y2K problem. Every byte mattered.

That's true but I think it was more due to not having excess core memory for running programs rather than disk space that made it so programmers only used 2 digits to express the year. The mainframe computers back then had far less memory than the average desktop (heck, most phones have more memory) of today.

You are right of course. If I remember correctly, in the early 80's, I think our IBM mainframe was running on 256MB.