Hard Disk Drive turns 55

[Phone Man]

Celebrating the 55th anniversary of the hard disk ? The Register





The data capacity was 5MB (8-bit bytes, 7-bits for data plus a parity bit) and it would cost a business $38,400 a year to lease it.


Jim

 

[Dave76]

Wow, that is an incredible story, we are fortunate to have TBs of storage today.

 

[CyberZeus]

I remember my first hard disk: 10 MB in capacity, a lot of space in those years... I'm talking about more than 20 years ago...

 

[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!

 

[Al Fairclough]

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!

I owned the very same drive. For all I know, it is still running.:shock:

 

[Wishmaster]

Very Interesting.

Amazing how fast technology advances.

Those were only capable of holding 1 modern MP3 file ...
And today 1000s is quite easy, and the storage is fairly cheap.


Of course at the time, that was alot of storage. its just hard for many of us to wrap our head around in this day and time.
I mean, thats no where close to enough strorage for a mobile phone, much less a PC.

 

[richnrockville]

Some early hard disks were referred to as "winchester" disks. I remember a friend with a 10 megabyte that he had paid almost $3000 for in the early days of the ibmpc before the xt model. I also paid over $800 for a 30 megabyte hard disk back in the early 80's.
Oh, those olden days when 160k single sided floppies were king.

Rich

 

[strollin]

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.

 

[Beta]

I remember when I got my Western digital 6GB IDE hard drive in the early 90's. I was like 6GB what will I ever put on it?! It is still working today. I installed it on a 939 AMD build for a momento of what was. I use it as a bootable drive to install Windows 7 of all things.

 

[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.

 

[Phone Man]

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

 

[Jaime74656]

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!

 

[strollin]

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.

 

[Gator]

I remember my first computer used a real floppy disk and we had no games. If you wanted a game you had to read the manual and create your own. The manual was a binder about the size of a cinder block and that enabled you to create a game with a cursor and a bunch of lines. lol

 

[Corazon]

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.

 

[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.

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

 

[strollin]

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.

 

[CyberZeus]

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)...

 

[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.

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.

 

[maxseven]

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

I think we paid over a grand for the 20Mb Apple external add-on HDD for my wife's Mac back in the early 80s. That was a lot of storage, even for a Macintosh!

My first "PC" was the IMSAI 8080 kit I built myself around 1975; a 16K RAM card cost me over $750. You read that right--16Kilobytes!