Sunday, November 10, 2019

A 10MB hard drive from the 1960s


9 comments:

  1. Not a drive, that's just one disc with a RW surface on either side. You would typically have 5 or 10 of these stacked to get 10Mb and probably from the 70s.
    The drive itself would come in about the size of a Maytag.
    In the 60s to get 10 Mb you would have have a machine the size of a typical UPS truck.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. They were also prone to catching fire and usually had a halon fire suppression system that went with them.

      Delete
    2. There was a lot of rotational energy in those things when they were running. I saw what was left of one long ago in the Air Force. The spindle or maybe a bearing that it fit into broke while it was running. It looked like a grenade had gone off inside.

      Delete
  2. Somewhere in a closet I have an issue of Byte from the late '70's that has an advertisement for a 1 Mb Winchester "desktop" hard drive.

    Price was $9999.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I worked with a Ramtek device in 1983 - 84 that had a stack of those things in a clear cover atop a machine the size of... a large hi-fi. Not that many would understand that comparison today, either.

    ReplyDelete
  4. From Back in the Day when everyone was using electrons about the size of a BB.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I remember those days well. The breakneck advancement, the rise and fall of hardware generations.

    It's as if a military guy had served at Bunker Hill, Gettysburg, Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, Vietnam and both Gulf Wars.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Good to see I'm not the only old coot who remembers those dishwasher sized hard drives. Programming in Fortran IV on IBM punch cards hauled around in shoe boxes. What fun it was!

    ReplyDelete