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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)

#21

Post by pjdesno »

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,…

WD says that the track width on their newest drives is about 50nm. The servo has to position the head with an accuracy considerably smaller than that, especially for writes - for reads you can just try again if you're off center. (which is why some drives have different seek time numbers for read and write - they don't need as much "settling time" for reads) For comparison, green light has a wavelength of about 550nm.

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

#22

Post by cm2187 »

jasongill wrote: post #16
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!

Actually I thought this was 10. Just double checked and a consumer drive in more like 50. Floppy disk seems to be less than 5.

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

#24

Post by kjs3 »

bdavis__ wrote: post #23

Nope. CDC 300MB Removable platters SMD. http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201... More storage than you thought possible. And it was widely used for about 10 years.

Nope. That's like saying biplanes aren't important because the DC-3 came along.

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

#25

Post by kjs3 »

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?

Built IBM into a global power. Went to the moon. Stuff like that.

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

#27

Post by mech422 »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #12
xtracto wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.).

Those were the 'I/O operators' where I worked... the 'system operators' (computer operators) were the guys that got the big bucks to alter jcl and drink coffee :-P

I also worked at places with dedicated 'print pool' operators, that basically fed paper into printers/bursters/collators/binders.

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

#28

Post by mech422 »

BXLE_1-1-BitIs1 wrote: post #26

I remember watching one of these drives in operation back in the late '60s. It was BIG. The 360s started out with 2311s, then 3330s came with 370s. The multi platter disks were removable.

With 'Angel food' cake covers to keep the platters clean...

I remember when I saw my fist DEC disk pack how slim they looked in comparison :-)

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

#29

Post by tengwar2 »

xtracto wrote: post #4
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?

My first computer with a hard disk was 10MB. You could store the operating system (MSDOS 5) and several programs (I remember Professional Write and QPRO. Not only that, but you could even store games. Prince of Persia was available in 2 floppies (5 1/4") with 720KB each one. You could store the whole game in the hard disk as well... This was around 1990. In 1956, 5MB was plent of storage.

Back in the early 90's, the first computer that I owned was a Psion 3 PDA with 256kB of battery-backed RAM, which was shared automatically between "disk" and working memory. Applications were held in ROM. On one occasion I needed to prepare a church address list. I entered the contact details in to a new contacts list (actually a simple flat-file database), exported to the spreadsheet to sort them, then exported to the word processor for formatting and printing. Not only was it possible, but it was easy. So yes, 5MB was a lot.

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

#30

Post by bdavis__ »

kjs3 wrote: post #24
bdavis__ wrote: post #23

Nope. CDC 300MB Removable platters SMD. http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/201... More storage than you thought possible. And it was widely used for about 10 years.

Nope. That's like saying biplanes aren't important because the DC-3 came along.

"changed the world". a couple of 5MB drives were important, but delivering 4 300MB drives to every credit union, bank, and medium sized business is what changed the world.
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