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The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

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Re: The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

#11

Post by tresqotheq »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #10
blakesterz wrote: post #2

"The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks--each of them a pizza-size 24 inches--was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."" So maybe a dumb question... what were they doing with that thing back in 1956? That's such a small amount of data in such a large space, was this actually used to do anything useful after it was sold?

It's not a dumb question. Consider the value in moving calculations from paper to a spreadsheet. That's _about_ what it was like in the early computing days in terms of overall amount of data and the types of general processing that were done with it. Incredibly useful but only applicable to a narrow range of tasks.

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Re: The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

#12

Post by Turing_Machine »

xtracto wrote: post #6
Turing_Machine wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't think of it as two MP3s. Think of it as 25-30 book-length volumes of text. That was plenty to handle payroll, inventory, sales, etc. for a business, especially since the data model back then was to only keep current, live data on the disk, while archiving old data off on tapes.

Also, reading from the article they are mentioning that there was already tape storage (non random access). I can imagine that the 5MB random access disks were using as "working memory" and then results where still stored in tape.

Definitely.

"Batch processing" often involved reading the data off one tape into the CPU, processing it, then writing it back out onto another tape.

"Computer operators" basically did nothing but load the proper tapes onto the drives at the proper times (plus replacing printer consumables, etc.).

Re: The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

#13

Post by cm2187 »

Hard drives are at this stage where no one will really miss them given their performance vs SSDs, but still common enough to not attract nostalgia. I think it is still mind blowing that such a cheap device can move a physical head over a disk within a minuscule precision, both in term of position and distance above the disk, and this many times per second. Yes it doesn’t do a million iops, it only does like 10 iops, but I am still impressed we get those 10 iops on a cheap consumer devices that stores TBs of data.

Re: The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

#14

Post by [deleted] »

blakesterz wrote: post #2

"The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks--each of them a pizza-size 24 inches--was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."" So maybe a dumb question... what were they doing with that thing back in 1956? That's such a small amount of data in such a large space, was this actually used to do anything useful after it was sold?

[deleted]

Re: The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

#15

Post by yesenadam »

tresqotheq wrote: post #11
michaelbuckbee wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a dumb question. Consider the value in moving calculations from paper to a spreadsheet. That's _about_ what it was like in the early computing days in terms of overall amount of data and the types of general processing that were done with it. Incredibly useful but only applicable to a narrow range of tasks.

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Hi. You seem new to HN, and have already written a few such comments. Don't do that here, thanks. Please read the "In comments" section of the guidelines, which starts with "Be kind." Thanks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

#16

Post by jasongill »

cm2187 wrote: post #13

Hard drives are at this stage where no one will really miss them given their performance vs SSDs, but still common enough to not attract nostalgia. I think it is still mind blowing that such a cheap device can move a physical head over a disk within a minuscule precision, both in term of position and distance above the disk, and this many times per second. Yes it doesn’t do a million iops, it only does like 10 iops,…

I know you're making an exaggerated comparison, but 10 IOPS would be closer to the performance of a floppy disk than even a 5400rpm consumer hard drive (depending on workload, of course). Imagine if we still had to deal with the performance of floppy drives on a daily basis!

Re: The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

#17

Post by bluedino »

blakesterz wrote: post #2

"The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks--each of them a pizza-size 24 inches--was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."" So maybe a dumb question... what were they doing with that thing back in 1956? That's such a small amount of data in such a large space, was this actually used to do anything useful after it was sold?

Some of the first personal computers only came with 4k of memory

Re: The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

#18

Post by mixmastamyk »

blakesterz wrote: post #2

"The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks--each of them a pizza-size 24 inches--was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."" So maybe a dumb question... what were they doing with that thing back in 1956? That's such a small amount of data in such a large space, was this actually used to do anything useful after it was sold?

No, video, no audio. Decent amount of storage for text/data files. Offload the old ones to tape. Make do with what’s available.

Re: The Hard Disk That Changed the World (2006)

#19

Post by kps »

blakesterz wrote: post #2

"The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks--each of them a pizza-size 24 inches--was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."" So maybe a dumb question... what were they doing with that thing back in 1956? That's such a small amount of data in such a large space, was this actually used to do anything useful after it was sold?

It's the equivalent of 36 feet of punch cards. That's a lot of storage.
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