Tech History Ping!................
“Gentlemen, start your platters!”
To me, there were two significant improvements to the original IBM PC architecture. Number one was the internal hard drive. USB = #2.
My first true hard drive was 15 meg — 90 lbs
Winchester — took 3 minutes to stabilize before heads could access platters.
Hell, a DemocRAT congress-critter can store zero bytes of information on a five-hundred page piece of legislation.
And a liberal kollege pro-phessor can exceed that by a factor of ten in his/her/its book(s).
The capability and cost have both improved dramatically.
The problem: when it fails you are back to zero.
For example, the CDK software hack shut down the systems of half the car dealers in the country last week. It is still going, and will continue until at least the end of June.
They are doing sales, leasing, service, repairs all by hand.
I remember the first small one gig hard drive that fit in a memory card slot. Some $300 — for digital cameras.
Looks like it’s about the size of a Mazda Wankel engine.
Looks like you need to check your calibers.
Now there's this:
San Disk Extreme - 256 GB for $27
I started out my IT career after the Navy working on 14-inch platters. Then at Maxtor and later Seagate with 5-1/4-inch full-size Winchester drives—for years I had a 5MB drive, may still have it in a box somewhere. Now I’ve got multi-terabyte USB flash drives!
-PJ
I remember when I upgraded my Macintosh SE (2 3.5” floppy drives) with a 30MB hard disk from Seagate. My friend said I was “crazy.” “You are NEVER going to fill it!”
My first pc had a 40MB HD, probably early 90’s and a blistering 14.4K modem
And to think I was feeling old because I remember when Hard Drives broke the $1 per MB of storage threshold.
I never had one of those, or even seen one like that.
a friend in the early 80s bought a 5mb hd for his apple ][ so that games would load runner faster.
so much different today, It does not seem so long ago that I spent way too much money building a nas with 5x3 tb hd with software raid 5 cause hardware raid is total eventual failure
today I have a bunch of e1.s drives
https://www.storagereview.com/review/sk-hynix-pe8110-e1-s-ssd-hands-on
and more cores than you could possibly imagine 20 years ago
I have a coworker that might has one of those drives, I will ask him next time I see him. probably 20% odds.
one of the non current co-worker female hoarder ones that worked for DEC in the 80s probably does.
First Novell server I worked on back in the 90’s was the size of a dorm refrigerator and was 500 MB. It was screaming.
Looks like a concrete saw in drag.
Caption: "The storage capacity of the original 8414 series is 7.5MB per disc pack. Our drives (1970s, 8425 series) can already store 50MB. For that time, this was an incredible size"
Here is the the read head assembly. (Not a happy day if you had a read head tracking failure! )
Caption: "The disc heads are amazingly big. The moving coil (on the left hand) plunges into an heavy pot magnet (not visible in the picture) and thus moves the complete slide on it's position. Therefore it works just as an ordinary loudspeaker, but the moving masses are much higher. The predecessor still moved the sled pneumatically. There is a bottle of wine in the right hand of the picture for comparison. "
(Link: https://www.technikum29.de/en/devices/univac9400/discdrives.php)