Hard Disk Drive turns 55

[jsquareg]

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!

Were you at San Jose during the 2311 and 2314 era? Those were my introduction to DASD's!

 

[strollin]

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!

Were you at San Jose during the 2311 and 2314 era? Those were my introduction to DASD's!

No, those products pre-date my time at IBM. The first DASD products I worked on were the 3340 & 3350.

 

[msdos622wasfun]

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.

True, efficiency and compactness were the number one priority I guess.

 

[kado897]

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.

True, efficiency and compactness were the number one priority I guess.

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.

 

[richnrockville]

For one thing I get the idea that we have some old people in this topic. I remember when dos came on a 160K single sided floppy and command.com was 1245 bytes..

Rich

 

[kado897]

For one thing I get the idea that we have some old people in this topic. I remember when dos came on a 160K single sided floppy and command.com was 1245 bytes..

Rich

And BASICA was part of the firmware.

 

[strollin]

For one thing I get the idea that we have some old people in this topic. I remember when dos came on a 160K single sided floppy and command.com was 1245 bytes..

Rich

And BASICA was part of the firmware.

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.

 

[kado897]

For one thing I get the idea that we have some old people in this topic. I remember when dos came on a 160K single sided floppy and command.com was 1245 bytes..

Rich

And BASICA was part of the firmware.

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.

Ah yes. I remember now.

 

[whs]

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

 

[kado897]

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's a great site. When i have the time I must have a closer look.

 

[jsquareg]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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]

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.