A 5MB hard drive in 1956

wonder what the RPM was on that baby

Yeah, but it still ran Quake pretty well.

Going for a new threads submitted record or something?

picture is a fake

SEPT 23 1989 wrote: »

picture is a fake

No it's not ...

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_350.html

kingtiger wrote: »

wonder what the RPM was on that baby

Depends on who was turning the hand crack. John Joe could get it up to 0.03kb per second.

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

Anyone remember the zip drives?

Indeed I do. I sold one to someone on adverts.ie only a couple of years ago in fact! Turns out they're much in demand as there's an old but popular music synthesizer that takes them.

stimpson wrote: »

I remember when having a 5 1/4 inch floppy was something to boast about.

I've still got a box of 8" ones

Alun wrote: »

I've still got a box of 8" ones

<SNORK!>

Sephiroth_dude wrote: »

How much could one of them store?

160kB, 320kB, or 1.2MB depending on the evolution.

The_Valeyard wrote: »

I heard it had porn on it.

Well, obviously it had porn on it. I'd say the guys would be shocked by both the technological advances and the advances in porn that's been made since that hard drive.

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

Mercury delay lines is where it's at.

Williams tube.

:eek:

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":)

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

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.

Cormac... wrote: »

Going for a new threads submitted record or something?

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

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.

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!

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 ...