New
#20
Were you at San Jose during the 2311 and 2314 era? Those were my introduction to DASD's!I worked for IBM San Jose for 19 of those 55 years since the 305 RAMAC was developed. In 1981, in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the 305, they delivered one to my department to be "cleaned up". I'm not sure how long it had been sitting in a warehouse but it was full of spiderwebs and mice nests and such. We cleaned it up (it wasn't operational) to make it presentable to be put on display. While my guys were working on it, I got a good look at it's innards. It was an amazing mechanical marvel. It was pre solid state so there were banks and banks of tubes for it's control circuitry. The head had to fully extract itself from the disk it was currently reading to move to another disk and it moved up and down the vertical stack of disks. The access time must have been agonizingly slow on that thing compared to modern drives (The article says 600ms).
After my tenure with IBM in the disk drive business, it blows me away to see 3T 3.5" drives or large capacity USB thumb drives at the low prices they currently sell for.
In 1986, I bought my first HDD, a 20M Seagate ST-225 for $500, a cost of $25 per MB!