The Hard Drive turns 50 in September!

[adrian]

Source (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14096484/site/newsweek/)

IBM delivered the first disk drive 50 years ago. It was about the size of two refrigerators and weighed a ton.

August 7, 2006 issue - If there's a bottle of vintage champagne you've been saving, next month is the time to pop it open: it's the 50th anniversary of hard-disk storage. Don't laugh. On Sept. 13, 1956, IBM shipped the first unit of the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) and set in motion a process that would change the way we live.

The RAMAC, designed in Big Blue's San Jose, Calif., research center, is the ultimate ancestor of that 1.8-inch drive that holds 7,500 songs inside your pocket-size $299 iPod. Of course, the RAMAC would have made a lousy music player. The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you'd pay about $250,000 a year in today's dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving "heads" that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."
Time to celebrate!

[helen]

The computer that had biggest physical disk drive that I ever worked on (as an operator) was an one of a kind demostration system called the BCC-500, which some how ended up at UH Electrical Engineering department sometime during the mid-1970's. I got involved with it in 1979.

Before 1979, my computer experience was with a PDP-8/A made by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which was mounted inside a desk and the dual 8-inch floppy disk drive was mounted on the left side where the drawers would normally be located. The other one was the DEC PDP-11/10 and it was the size of a refrigerator. It too had dual 8 inch floppy drive mounted in the same cabinet as the PDP-11/10, but later on in it's life another refrigerator size cabinet was temporarily mounted to it that held a two 2.5 Mbyte fixed disk drive and a removeable 2.5 Mbyte disk drive. I think the 8 inch floppies held around 400 Kilobytes of storage.

These systems were small in comparsion to the BCC-500. It was in the shape of a captial H, that took about 9 feet wide by at least 15 feet in length. That was just the computer and serial communications section. The disk drive itself was a seperate big box about 8 feet long, maybe about 4 feet high and wide. In it was the disk platters, I can't remember how many were in there or how much space it could hold, but a platter was roughly 3 feet in diameter.

Two things I was told about this disk drive. One if you had to shutdown the power to this disk drive you had to first make sure that the disk heads are not touching the platters. To do that you had to open a small window in the disk drive unit and very carefully take a probe and move the heads away manually. Secondly previous ruined disk platters were recycled as coffee tables. During my time there (which was for a year) I didn't have to shutdown that disk drive.

[Linkmeister]

The first computer the Honolulu Club had was an IBM S/34 with a 13.2MB hard drive (I know this because I was the DP guy there when the Club opened). The drive was about the size of a small pizza.

After two years or so I started agitating to upgrade our capacity because I kept having to offload data to run the bills. It took me a year, but finally I got approval to buy an additional 13.2MB drive. It too was the size of a pizza (made by Sun). It cost $5,000.

We also had to pay the travel expense for a Sun representative to come out and install the thing.

Here's a picture (http://www.science.uva.nl/faculteit/museum/s34_fs.html) (not from the Club). The CPU is at the back (about 5 feet tall, 6 feet long, 2 feet wide). The big box to the left looks to be a 3262 line printer. The three terminals look like IBM 5251s.