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.
The XForce won't save you from a burning building but, they just might make your surfing safer. The XForce is IBM's team of Internet Security Systems researchers and they've just released the 
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
