A 5MB hard drive in 1956

Capt'n Midnight

jimgoose wrote: »

Ye youngsters with ye're ferrite core memory and reliable mass-storage. Gimme a Royal McBee LGP-30 with an IBM 533 punched-card reader. :cool:

Mercury delay lines is where it's at.

kingtiger

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

I'd be more worried about the inertia. If it wasn't bolted to the floor it would probably start hopping around the place and take off through the nearest wall.

indeed

kind of like the washing machine in Fargo the TV series

bonzodog2

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Mercury delay lines is where it's at.

Williams tube.

:eek:

Depraved

It's like the incredible increase in processor speeds. When I first started using and programming computers, the CPU speed was 1 mhz, and RAM was 64kb (C64).
Now we have 8 core 3000mhz processors for sale!

In Assembly language, it took quite some time to write code that would fill up that 64kb of memory. I remember when the Amiga 1200 came out with 2mb of RAM and I couldn't understand why you would need that much memory or how one person could spend all that time creating an application/game to use it all.

P.S. Does anyone remember the daisy wheel black & white printers? Or should I say grey & white printers!

jimgoose

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

I'd be more worried about the inertia. If it wasn't bolted to the floor it would probably start hopping around the place and take off through the nearest wall.

Maybe you should Google "walking disk-drive":)

Senna

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

Anyone remember the zip drives?

My workplace only got rid of zip drives about 6 years ago.

SeanW

You could probably have run MS-DOS on that, MS-DOS 6.22 came with 3 floppies, at 1.44MB each
*gets calculator*
4.32MB.

So you could put DOS on it but not much else.
Spoiler: I remember very little before DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1

Grayson

Depraved wrote: »

It's like the incredible increase in processor speeds. When I first started using and programming computers, the CPU speed was 1 mhz, and RAM was 64kb (C64).
Now we have 8 core 3000mhz processors for sale!

In Assembly language, it took quite some time to write code that would fill up that 64kb of memory. I remember when the Amiga 1200 came out with 2mb of RAM and I couldn't understand why you would need that much memory or how one person could spend all that time creating an application/game to use it all.

P.S. Does anyone remember the daisy wheel black & white printers? Or should I say grey & white printers!

Phones have octocores now. Octo fcuking cores

paulbok

It's only 9 years ago I had to badger the company I worked for to get me a 1Gb usb drive to back up some files that wouldn't fit on a cd.
Cost the guts of €100.

stimpson

I think this thread should be moved to Oulwans and Oulfellas forum.

AlanS181824

It's crazy how far we've come over the years.

Capt'n Midnight

SeanW wrote: »

You could probably have run MS-DOS on that, MS-DOS 6.22 came with 3 floppies, at 1.44MB each
*gets calculator*
4.32MB.

So you could put DOS on it but not much else.
Spoiler: I remember very little before DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1

If you trimmed the fat you could stick a stripped down version of Dos 5 and windows 3.1 on a floppy

using a ramdrive and unzip files and you could fit some more

easy enough to format a a 1.44MB floppy to 1.6MB or even 1.72MB
there was evena little TSR that allowed you to fit nearly 2MB on a floppy

kowloon

Cormac... wrote: »

Going for a new threads submitted record or something?

A fair bit off Mike's record, much work to do.

Capt'n Midnight

AlanS181824 wrote: »

It's crazy how far we've come over the years.

This picture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PPTMooresLawai.jpg

cost of processing power per dollar , going back to electromechanical counters of 1900

Bipolar Joe

Depraved wrote: »

It's like the incredible increase in processor speeds. When I first started using and programming computers, the CPU speed was 1 mhz, and RAM was 64kb (C64).
Now we have 8 core 3000mhz processors for sale!

In Assembly language, it took quite some time to write code that would fill up that 64kb of memory. I remember when the Amiga 1200 came out with 2mb of RAM and I couldn't understand why you would need that much memory or how one person could spend all that time creating an application/game to use it all.

P.S. Does anyone remember the daisy wheel black & white printers? Or should I say grey & white printers!

My C64C still gets online.

The Corinthian

This used to be cutting edge.

SeanW

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

If you trimmed the fat you could stick a stripped down version of Dos 5 and windows 3.1 on a floppy

using a ramdrive and unzip files and you could fit some more

easy enough to format a a 1.44MB floppy to 1.6MB or even 1.72MB
there was evena little TSR that allowed you to fit nearly 2MB on a floppy

Probably not being fair to the old HD though, for the time it was quite revolutionary.

I'm guessing that thing came out in the late 60's or early 70's. At the time "computers" used either punch cards, punch tapes (tapes made out of paper :eek:) or if they were REALLY high tech, magnetic tape. The "Operating System" as such would probably have been stored in some kind of ROM module.

under a system like this, 5MB would probably store a mid sized database of text, say a list of company staff, customers, bank accounts, balances, transactions etc. Though for something large it might have been tight. Of course, something large would have been even worse on punch-cards.

To give ye an idea just how crappy computer were back then, two large American railroads (the New York Central and the Pennsylvania) merged in '68 to form the Penn Central. It went bankrupt in 1970. One of the dozens of issues that doomed them was an ill planned all-at-once merger of operations, including their computer systems, which were totally incompatible and based on different architectures, even though both were supplied by the same company (IBM).

Now, the first I remember of computers was in the '90s when you had computers (PCs and Mac) dramatically more advanced with the same physical architecture (CPU, motherboard, 100s of MBs of hard drive space, sound card, floppy drives etc) and they wouldn't work with each other. If you formatted a floppy for one, you would be lucky if the other recognised the filing system on the disk, let alone were able to use anything on it.

This was a good two generations or so after the computers in the OP. You really had to know what you were doing with that kind of hardware!

circadian

jimgoose wrote: »

Ye youngsters with ye're ferrite core memory and reliable mass-storage. Gimme a Royal McBee LGP-30 with an IBM 533 punched-card reader. :cool:

IBM punch card reader, great for genocide.

Alun

SeanW wrote: »

I'm guessing that thing came out in the late 60's or early 70's. At the time "computers" used either punch cards, punch tapes (tapes made out of paper :eek:) or if they were REALLY high tech, magnetic tape. The "Operating System" as such would probably have been stored in some kind of ROM module.

The first computer I worked on in my first job in 1978 was an Interdata 7/16 minicomputer. To boot that thing was a real trial .. first you had to key in a short 1st level bootstrap program by hand, using the hex key pad on the front. Get one digit wrong and you had to start again from scratch. This allowed you to load in the second level bootstrap from paper tape, well actually it was a special mylar tape that didn't wear out as quickly, but the principal is the same. Once that was loaded you could load the OS itself from disk.

That wasn't the end of the problems though The memory on the thing was so tiny, I can't remember how much, but it was measured in kB not MB, that you had no alternative but to continuously page code in and out of memory, but the disk was so small and dog slow it didn't really work properly for that application. But never fear, help was at hand in the from of a magnetic drum. This was quite literally a rotating drum with a magnetic coating and several stationary heads, so no seek times which sped things up. However, I remember one of the system programmers tearing his hair out working out how best to physically position the code segments on the drum to minimise latency when it was time to load one of them from the drum.

Different times ...

jumbobreakfast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBjoWMA5d84

Sephiroth_dude

Bipolar Joe wrote: »

My C64C still gets online.

How do you get it online ? I didnt know you get them online

My first computer in 99 was Acer 286,4mb of ram with dos 5.0 , i made my confirmation that year and spent 50 pounds of it upgrading it too windows 3.1 good times .

jimgoose

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

How do you get it online ? I didnt know you get them online

My first computer in 99 was Acer 286,4mb of ram with dos 5.0 , i made my confirmation that year and spent 50 pounds of it upgrading it too windows 3.1 good times .

In Elder Days you dialled up bulletin-boards, mainly in England, via 1200 baud modem.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum+ in 1984, with a trouser-flapping 48kB core memory and no mass-storage bar an audio tape interface that positively howled along at (IIRC) 16KB per-100 seconds.

EDIT: Y'know, it occurs to me that aside from confounding young Java-heads with the UltraSPARC delay-slot in assembler, I've never had more fun with a computer than playing around with that little thing way back in the day.

Grayson

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

How do you get it online ? I didnt know you get them online

My first computer in 99 was Acer 286,4mb of ram with dos 5.0 , i made my confirmation that year and spent 50 pounds of it upgrading it too windows 3.1 good times .

In 99 surely it would have come with 98 or at least 95?

My first computer in 2000 was a Dell 4100. came with 128mb of memory and a 20gb hdd. I remember thinking that I might need to buy another hard drive in 6 months because I might have filled it by then.

SeanW

Grayson wrote: »

In 99 surely it would have come with 98 or at least 95?

My first computer in 2000 was a Dell 4100. came with 128mb of memory and a 20gb hdd. I remember thinking that I might need to buy another hard drive in 6 months because I might have filled it by then.

Not if he bought it second hand. My first rig was a Pentium 1, 166Mhz, 16MB ram, 2GB HD (Plenty before the advent of Mp3), came with Windows 95 but I liked Windows 3.1 better so rolled it back, all the hardware was compatible with both ...

Sephiroth_dude

Grayson wrote: »

In 99 surely it would have come with 98 or at least 95?

My first computer in 2000 was a Dell 4100. came with 128mb of memory and a 20gb hdd. I remember thinking that I might need to buy another hard drive in 6 months because I might have filled it by then.

No it was a second hand computer my dad got from work.

kingtiger

Grayson wrote: »

In 99 surely it would have come with 98 or at least 95?

it was probably 2nd hand, it had a 286 CPU

don't think that could run Win 95

Alun

jimgoose wrote: »

In Elder Days you dialled up bulletin-boards, mainly in England, via 1200 baud modem.

1200 Baud? Luxury

My first online experience was with BIX (Byte Information Exchange), a bulletin board in the US run by Byte magazine. I was in Germany at the time, so wouldn't be able to call the US directly, but was able to contact it via X.25. Deutsche Telekom took some persuading to allow a mere mortal like myself to access their X.25 network, but eventually they gave in. Dialled up the X.25 PAD with a 300 baud acoustic coupler attached to my NEC APC using a terminal emulator with kermit that I'd written myself in Turbo Pascal.

jimgoose

Alun wrote: »

1200 Baud? Luxury

My first online experience was with BIX (Byte Information Exchange), a bulletin board in the US run by Byte magazine. I was in Germany at the time, so wouldn't be able to call the US directly, but was able to contact it via X.25. Deutsche Telekom took some persuading to allow a mere mortal like myself to access their X.25 network, but eventually they gave in. Dialled up the X.25 PAD with a 300 baud acoustic coupler attached to my NEC APC using a terminal emulator with kermit that I'd written myself in Turbo Pascal.

Hardass. Tell that t'young folk today, and they won't believe you! :cool:

_Brian

Quick note on Ireland's first computer.. 1957

http://atlas.ingeniousireland.ie/irelands-first-computer-1957-for-thurles-sugar-factory/

Alun

jimgoose wrote: »

Hardass. Tell that t'young folk today, and they won't believe you! :cool:

Actually looking back, I have difficulty believing I did all that myself too!