1956 Computer Hard Drive

[Ron61]

Take a look at this. It is even more bulky than Fred's coal fired computer. The first ones that I worked on were at least disk shaped and about 5 feet in diameter and held almost three times what this one does. And NO Warren and Fred the rocks we chipped information into don't count.

http://www.snopes.com/photos/technology/storage.asp

Ron

[wtm442]

Those were the days. Didn't ya just love punch cards ... especially if you dropped a box and they spilled out on the floor.

I remember the first compoooter I worked on in the late 60's. Huge platters (disks) about 2 feet across. Clunk! 1/4 turn.

[Ron61]

Ah, Yes, the punch cards. And the newer version of aluminum cards with the small magnetic dots. I saved a couple of those and when I show them to anyone they won't believe they had anything to do with computers. One was a right word card and the other a left word card and any left over after the data was written you have to combine for another address. I never dropped a box, but did see one guy do that and the tray had over 100 of them in it already written. Laughed so hard I had to go outside.

Ron

[trularin]

Reminds me of the Coka-cola machine controller I took apart in shcool. About as old and only held like 256k of program. A huge rotating cylinder with a ferro-magnetic surface.

What is the big deal with the old storage unit..anyway?

[Ron61]

Just to give some of the younger generation who never saw anything but a chip an idea of what computers actually used to use. Some of the early memory modules we used would take three people to put one in. Two to lift and hold it and one to fasten it. And they held about 56K. I saw on the History channel the other day that all the computers combined that they used when Apollo 13 had it's problems going to the moon had less computing power than a good PC now. Technology is now measured in minutes and not days or hours.

I am still waiting for them to put in fiber optic here but it won't be done in my lifetime. We did put in fiber optic cables between some of the computers while I was still working and that was as far as it went. One fiber optic cable about the size of your thumb with all the shielding and 7 optic strands replaced two 3500 pair cables.

Ron

[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.

[BeanCounter]

I started back in the old 7040 with 1401 input unit days. You had to wire it from the back.

I remember my first IBM PC. 8 K of memory, 2 160K floppies, and a monochrome monitor. Upped the memory to 16k and added a Santa Clara Operations 2.5mb hard disk, $6,300. Hand built a multiplexor card so I could tie into all of our POS terminals in Crown Center to keep sales and inventory info. Ah, the days. Beat the hell out of those 13 column spreadsheets.

[Cobrabill]

More early computer triva-what WWII aircraft used computers on board.And i don't mean the Norden either.
I'll be giving the answer away if i post anymore info.

[Ron61]

Bill,

I think I know but won't guess as I may be wrong. Also the term bug came from a moth getting between the contacts of a relay in one of the old computers. I think, but am not sure that one was in the fire control system of a navy ship but it could have been down at one of the early computer companies.

Bean Counter,

Boy do you guys bring back some memories of stuff that I have completely forgotten. I remember my first real, not replica, computer and it had the monitor and keyboard all in a single unit with two 2 1/2" floppies that ran it. I had to solder and wire in all the cards and then I got a blazing fast modem that set on the desk beside it so I could connect to bulletin boards. I think the computer had 16K of memory and the modem was around 300 bits per second. The first had drives we even had in the big computers were about 5' in diameter and were mounted vertically with a steel cover that bolted over them. One for each processor and no way for one processor to access the others drive until I got the labs to come up with a crossover system so if one processor went out and the other drive was bad, which was a very common occurrence in those days you could switch the processor that worked to use the disk that still worked. By wire of course.

Edit: If it lightens up today I will see if I can get a good picture of those two modern memory cards that I saved out of one of the old computers that we junked. Far superior to the old punch cards.

Ron

[tfalk]

Ahh, memories...

The first computer I worked on was a Honeywell 200, 16K main memory, 8 tape drives,
holerith card reader, paper tape reader... Then I moved up to the 1401,
1410, 7010 and the holy grail, the 360

My first PC, I could turn on the power switch and listen for the jet engine disk
drive to spool up... I could walk down 2 flights of stairs, get coffee and a bagel,
walk back up 2 flights of stairs and it would finally be at the C:\ prompt. I still
have a 5 or 10 meg disk drive somewhere, I still have a couple of boxes of holerith
cards laying around and a 9 inch floppy disk from an old Teradata PC

Now that you mention it, I might still have a 640K memory add-on card for an XT
laying around somewhere.

My wedding present from my wife was a Heathkit H19 terminal kit that I had to assemble.
First time I ever used a soldering iron, it fired up on the first power on, I was shocked
Combined with the upgraded 300bps modem, it saved me many a night of going over to
the computer center at Rutgers while I finished my degree. Oh yeah, the modem wasn't one
of the new-fangled cable jobs, it was the old style where you had to put the phone handset
into the foam ear-pieces when you heard the other end answer with the modem tone...

If you take the better tour at NASA, you can go into the control room bunker where they
launched the mercury astronauts from... When you see the technology from back then, you
realize just how amazing it was they survived...

[Ron61]

Tfalk,

I built several kits from the old Heathkit company. All were good too. I built a dual trace oscilloscope and I can't remember all the rest of the things I built. The first big computer I worked on took up two full stories and must have had a million relays. Everything was programmed by wiring which had at least what seemed to be a million little terminals sticking out and we had to use a wire wrap gun to put the little wire on once we figured out which terminals had to be wired how. I used to have one of those modems where you put the phone in the cradle but gave it away. Darn, I wish I had taken pictures back then but it was hard as cameras had just been invented.

Ron

[tfalk]

Originally Posted by Ron61

Darn, I wish I had taken pictures back then but it was hard as cameras had just been invented.

Believe it or not, I was working on these beasts in the early 70's. I also purchased a Minolta SRT-201
camera around the same time that my sister is STILL USING to this day....
Damn thing still takes better pictures than my 8mp Konica-Minolta digital...

[wtm442]

Originally Posted by Ron61

I built several kits from the old Heathkit company. All were good too. Ron

I still have my Heathkit timing light. I just found it hidden in the back of a drawer last week. I'll have to see if it still works!

[Ron61]

I thought that was a good company. Everything that I ever built that I bought from them was very accurate and lasted forever. I had almost forgotten about them until it was mentioned in the earlier post.

Ron

[Ron61]

Finally I managed to get a picture of one of the modern memory cards that replace punch cards. There were 8 bays of these, 200 cards per bay, for one Program Store. Even a small office like Enterprise had 14 Program Stores.



Ron

[BeanCounter]

Anybody remember pushing these little gems into the MB's of the new AT until your fingers were sore?


I still have a 286 processor and some of these laying around.

[Ron61]

Yes, and I notice the typical bent prong on the top one. I still have all of my computer equipment and it has a prong straightener for all different types of those. Darn, maybe we should gather all of each others old parts and build a real working computer. Run DOS and have no crashes.

Ron