Filed under: Retrocomputing
Ever wonder who your hard drive's father is?
Nowhere, that's where.
So hard disk drive, we salute you. These videos, which I found on the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center are true gems. The first, an IBM marketing film-strip ca. 1957, dramatizes the invention of the hard disk at 99 Notre Dame, San Jose, California by IBM engineers in the early 1950s. The entire concept of storing data in such a way that it's directly addressable, and accessible at random is so heady and incomprehensible for the time, they explain it over and over again. It even demonstrates how they built a marketing tour bus and went on the road to demo the new hotness to customers across the USA.
The second is a true geeky-pleasure masterpiece. A very technical discussion of the inner workings of IBM's second generation of hard drives. Possibly intended for engineers who serviced the units -- which look larger than your washing machine and dryer put together -- it's as dry as a bread sandwich, but it shows some amazing footage of the inner workings doing their thing. Amazingly, those inner workings haven't really changed *that* much in principle, they've just gotten a whole lot smaller, faster, cheaper and densely packed with bits and bytes.
Grab some popcorn and click through to check out both videos.
So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do.
Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game.
The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Taai said 4:44PM on 7-27-2009
Oh, how huge hard disks were in that time!
I cannot immagine myself carrying that big external hard disk with me. :D
Reply
MarkyB86 said 5:08PM on 7-27-2009
You wouldn't have to! Just get a tractor and pull it! they have caster wheels on them haahha
3Djesus said 4:47PM on 7-27-2009
I think about it sometimes, My neighbor is a retired Western Digital engineer.
Reply
jaybarti said 5:01PM on 7-27-2009
I remember I called my first and second hard drives the jets, because of how big they were and how much noise they made. They were huge for their time almost 4-5 times as big as a 3.5" drive in height.
I couldn't fit them in my case at the time and built external metal shells for them, and ran the hard drive ribbon out though the side of the case.
Reply
Alex Alegado said 5:19PM on 7-27-2009
I have a full-height, 5.25", 3600RPM, SCSI-1 hard drive on the shelf in my home office. The thing weighs a good 10lbs. When the thing starts up it makes a whine that resembles a jet engine spooling up. I bought it as a refurbish drive in a new enclosure in 1994. The mechanism itself is probably a year or too older (15 years+). Capacity? 1.3GB.
Reply
Molly said 11:35AM on 7-28-2009
amazing, what we take for granted today :)
Reply
llsee said 12:11AM on 7-29-2009
In 1964, I was in the Air Force and worked on my first computer. It was an IBM 1410 (a bigger cousin to the famous 1401) and it had a 1301 RAMAC disk unit. That puppy was 6 ft high, and 8 feet long. It had hydraulic actuator arms. When running a disk intensive program, the unit would sway from side to side as the arms moved. If we shut the system down (as we would on holidays), on start-up we had to run a warm-up routine to insure that the arms were moving freely. When the routine ran, the arms would move in and out in a pattern, and it all sounded like an old Model T engine.
Wow, today I sit at my desk, and have a 16x14x6 INCH box that has a multi-core processor, 3 GB of memory (the 1410 had a maximum of 64 Kb), and 2 500 GB disk drives. The communication and graphics capabilities of my computer now, were beyond comprehension back then.
Reply