New hard drive --- well from the 1970s-1990

[JCitron]

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/...argest-and-most-expensive-hard-drive-teardown

IBM made these drives for their old 3390 servers. The drives cost around $50,000 to $100,000 back in 1989.

The drive was a whopping 22.7 GB!

John

 

[Greenvwbeetle]

Wow you could even fit Trainz 2012 on that huge hard drive! Could you even imagine if they made a hard drive that big now it would hold so much data I would be ridiculous!

 

[chrisaw]

I remember those, we had a wrecked one after a head crash.
It made a terrific frizbee and got stuck in the plaster of the office wall. Could have taken someones head off at the shoulders!

Chris.

 

[JCitron]

I remember those, we had a wrecked one after a head crash.
It made a terrific frizbee and got stuck in the plaster of the office wall. Could have taken someones head off at the shoulders!

Chris.

That must've been cool to see.

I used to fix the Phoenix and Hawk drivers which were bigger, size and volume wise, but a lot smaller data. These had removable platter sets and I had to calibrate the heads and fix the controller boxes. The calibration process was long and I would end up with the worst headache by the time I was done. The problem with recalibrating the drives was once the data was written incorrectly, it was never retrievable again once the heads were realigned.

I'm glad we don't worry about stuff like that anymore. That's the cool thing about modern technology the smaller device size and fewer mechanical parts. Now if the SSDs become more than just as reliable as a regular hard drive and hold even higher capacities, I may thing about getting one.

John

 

[frogpipe]

Had one platter around when I was a kid. If you hung the disk by a string (well rope) and hit it, it made an awesome ringing sound!

 

[RRSignal]

I actually had a huge Burroughs drive/comp and a Texas Instruments TI-990. I also had Tandon 10mb HDD that I actually used up until 1991 or 1992. It was as slow as a floppy but 10mb was a big deal at the time and it made for a good footrest. When it broke I took the thing apart and was impressed by the glass(?) platters and parts.

 

[rjhowie]

My first foray into computers was the Atari. What was it - 1G and yet you could have wordd processors, desk top publishing, etc on them! My brother had one as well and we loved those machines!

 

[sterrett]

Going back a bit further, to 1973, my first job was in the Shell Centre at Waterloo in London as a temporary messenger ferrying stuff between the two computer rooms and the team of programmers and systems analysts. Shell had two computers - an IBM 360 and a Univac 1108. Each machine and its spinning hard drives, tape drives, punch-card readers and paper tape readers etc occupied one floor of the "Downstream Building" - the Univac Machine on the Mezzanine Floor, the IBM on the First Floor.

I can remember on a naughty night shift, going up to the 26th floor of the "Upstream Building" and letting loose half a dozen paper tape rolls in the wee small hours! In fact, on nights, we regularly went up there and fired off paper aeroplanes which confused the Waterloo station staff, but that's another story!