1956 Computer Hard Drive

[VRM]

I used to work on the old 300M units that had a solid steel frame and weighed about 300 pounds. They were about the size of a washing machine. They used disk packs that had 9 double sided platters that spun at 3600rpm. Head crashes were always a lot of fun... I used to enjoy doing the alignments.

Thanks for the blast from the past Ron!

Steve

[Ron61]

Steve,

I remember those old 300M units. A real pain in the as* to get everything aligned and about the time you got them working right a head would crash. Boy does some of this stuff bring back things I had forgotten about. I went and found the two old aluminum memory cards that I did save. Each held 64 words of 44 bits each and there was a left and right hand card. It took 200 of them to make a module and they had a card writing machine that would normally sound like you were in a machine shop where they were using presses and about half way through each module it would eat a card and then you had to take everything apart to get the bent card out, replace it with a new one, figure out in binary what needed to be written on that card and then let the machine start again. Some of the big offices had a three man crew that did nothing but write those cards and they had three shifts.

Ron

[Tallguy]

I am still young (36), but saw the evolution of the home PC from our first "real" computer, an IBM with dual 5.25" disk drives and no hard drive back in 1980 for about $5000. I remember my dad upgrading the RAM to 512K (I think), and that was a big deal back then

What I think is intesting my kids generation (the are 8 and 5). They have no concept of the pre computer era, and would literally not know what a typewriter was if they saw one, but have been able to log on to the computer since about 2 years old.

There are some evenings where we have four people online at the same time, two desktops, two laptops both wireless, fast, and can't live without it........

Mark

[rdorman]

Amazing how far we have come in computer technology in such a short period of time. If only software could keep up. From that 5meg behemoth to 1gig memory being standard on a PC, Teraflop machines out and optical and quantum machines begining to commercially appear. They can put 200,000 times the amount of information in the area the size of a small pea.