November 1956 IBM aanounces the worlds First hard drive

I worked for NCR in the 60s as computer tech. Memory was expensive I think 15k for one machine was $75,000.Had a printer controller it had no memory and would steal memory cycles from the main computer.Worked at American Greeting card co they ran 24 7,two service men on each shift.Had four CDC card punches that punched 250 cards a minute.

My last few drive purchases have all been solid state drives (SSD) and my small 6-core MacPro with LaCie 1TB Little Big Disk Thunderbolt-2 Solid State Drive use the ultra fast PCIe SSD drives.

I bought a Corvus 5MB hard drive in 1982 that was the size of a shoebox and cost $5,000. A 10MB was only $7,500. Still they could be used on a network in place of a sneaker net with 8" 160K floppy drives which was what my first PC used.

It ran UNIX though which compensated for the lack of CPU power and DASD. Now with Windows I need all the CPU power and RAM I can get for this exceedingly badly engineered operating system.

The memories come crashing back.

How many have worked on a drum memory system? CRT memory?

NASA had a computer (ADACS) built by Kellogs that used a delay line memory looked just like a screen door spring all of 1024 bits.

Then later installing attached processor to add 8 channels and 256K of memory to an IBM main frame at a cost of over $1M.

Guess I must be getting old.

I'm really surprised to hear the first disc was so big, capacity-wise. The first one I worked with was in the 60s, from Digital Equipment, 32k 12-bit words. When we went to a megabyte platter, that felt like sci-fi. My college prof talked in terms of terabyte capacity. I thought he was a fruitcake, but he got the last laugh.

30yrs ago i was servicing Cincinnati Milacron CNC machines, with ferrite cord memory, paper tape load for the main system,

Don't forget ferite core 4k memory stacks.

Each bit had a dedicated tiny ferite donut with 3 thin wires running through it, depending on how it was magnitized it was either a 1 or 0.

Twenty years later you could power up a CPU with these memory boards and they would boot right up no problem.

Ron W.

I worked 20 years (my wife 22) at IBM in San Jose, CA where the disk drive was invented and the RAMAC was built. In 1981, I was the supervisor of the department responsible for testing the 3350 disk drive. We also did reconditioning of returned from lease 3350s and older drives such a the 3340 "Winchester". One day, for the 25th anniversary of the RAMAC, they hauled a RAMAC out of the warehouse and brought it to my department to be "reconditioned". I use that term loosely since the drive was no longer functional. We cleaned it up and made it presentable so it could be put on display in the lobby of one of buildings. It was interesting to see the insides of that drive and compare it newer drives to see how far the technology had come in 25 years.

When I see things like the 128GB micro SD card like bwanshoom posted the pic of, I'm completely blown away. The 3350 disk drive that I worked on at IBM was as large as a washer/dryer combo, required 220V AC to operate and only held 600MB of data! Not to mention that the 3350 cost thousands of dollars whereas the 128GB micro SD card can be purchased for around $100.

NRALIFR,Thunder Mountain that is interesting

Yes, the changes have truly been amazing. My father had a 33+ year career with IBM as a Field Engineer, and I literally grew up hearing about these amazing "machines" that I couldn't quite grasp. When I was very young, the only "machine" I knew about was the washing machine, so my earliest impressions of my Dad's job included him working on washing machines. I eventually figured it out! I think most boys have memories of times they spent at their Dad's knee, him teaching the son something important. Mine are of my Dad teaching me about the binary and hexadecimal number systems used by computers.

Dad's been retired for over 25 years now, and I'm within a few days of my 33rd anniversary with IBM myself. I've worked primarily in large data centers with multiple mainframes installed. Those would be the "big iron" dinosaurs that PC's were going to kill off. They're still out there, and they are incredibly powerful and reliable CPU's today. The hardware has become so economical to produce that most of the mainframes sold have massive amounts of "extra capacity" included that can be turned on quickly and easily by the user simply by downloading an enablement key. A guy like me with a toolbag doesn't even have to get involved, unless it's a really big upgrade where we're installing modules that have about 100 more CPU's available to be turned on. And, the individual CPU "chip" is so powerful that most of the time it's performance is dialed DOWN with microcode (firmware) to give the customer the performance level they're paying for.

The current enterprise class disk storage arrays are certainly impressive, with hundreds of single drives as large as 6 Terabytes if I remember right, and total available storage measured in Petabytes.

Solid state drives and flash storage are very popular now. SAN Volume Controllers and De-duplication servers are hardware/software data storage solutions that are extremely interesting devices to read about if you like that kind of thing.

To me, by far, the most interesting systems I work on today are the virtual tape libraries. Watching the consolidation of tape operations that just 15-20 years ago would have taken up tens of thousands of square feet of raised-floor computer room space into a single rack about the same size as a residential refrigerator has been mind boggling.

I could quite literally go on and on, but I better stop. Normal people just aren't that interested in what goes on behind the scenes when a credit card is swiped, a bill or a check is printed, an ATM transaction takes place, or a company's payroll is run. It's all magic! :B

:):)