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Hard Drive Memory Lane
Chabil Ha' writes "CNET has gathered together some good old nostalgia from the photo vault. What high-tech product advances the fastest? It's probably the hard drive. The capacity doubles easily every two years and sometimes every year, faster even than the chip progress described by Moore's Law. The first drives took up storage closets. Now, a 5GB drive can fit in a phone."
First hard drive my emplopyer paid for was 5MB. First one I paid for with muy owm money was 40MB, and that was a trade-off for a whopping 4MB of RAM. If I'd gone with 1MB of RAM, I could have had a 110MB drive at the same price. At that time, RAM cost way more than drivespace, and that RAM let me multitask Quattro Pro and Paradox under DR DOS (I think you could actually do it with 2MB). Life was good!
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
In the '80s I paid thousands for a 5MB hard drive that sounded like an airplane engine and required three controllers: the servo/logic board, an MFM-to-SASI adapter board (yes, these really existed, for RLL and ESDI and to and from SCSI too), and a SASI/SCSI-to-host-bus board.
;-)
I remember benchmarking the thing in excitement and getting a speed of 1 megabyte read in 96 seconds. A-W-E-S-O-M-E!
Later I replaced it with a 5MB SyQuest removable drive (yes, there was a time when SyQuest made 5.0MB removable disks that were 5.25" to a side by about 1" high) that had a window on the front and weatherstripping on the door to keep the dust out. Unfortunately, all of those disks eventually developed bad sectors (despite the weatherstripping!) and by the mid-'80s I was running my BBS on an ST-213 10MB half-height (what we'd now call "huge") MFM hard drive in a PC, having become fully commodified in my computing self.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Not wholly on topic, but this BBC article discusses the theoretical maximum speed of (modern) magnetic media.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3647055.stm
2.3 picoseconds is pretty quick, at least until someone makes a faster material.
Platform advocacy is like choosing a favorite severely developmentally disabled child.
Music is still only stereo, and most people are only storing lossy copies of it. When you have lossless 48 channel music at 384KHz, then we'll talk.
How about video? Even with lossy MPEG-2, you can still only store a few dozen hours of HDTV on the largest hard drives. Switch to lossless video, or perhaps holographic, and you'll need a hell of a lot more space.
We don't know what will develop. In a few years, will we all have full-fledged Earth Simulators running on our desktops, deciding when the next rainstorm will be?
How about wearing a device that monitors EVERY neuron, every muscle fiber, etc., to be analyzed to determine if we are beginning to develop any health problems?
Maybe a full copy of your own genome, which can be analysed in-detail by software.
Perhaps with the development of software radio, we'll just set our computers to record ALL of the electromagnetic spectrum, and pick out anything we might want to watch/hear later.
Maybe computer control of cars and servant robots will be possible, not because of wonderful A.I., but because every single possible senario being mapped to an appropriate response, and stored on a gigantic hard drive.
Maybe we'll have our own personal "Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy", that detects that you're looking at a specific car, and automatically tells you everything there is to know about it, the company that made it, the driving record of the person associated with the license plate number, etc. Personal histories of every person you look at. Reviews of the movie poster you glanced at. etc.
Or maybe a Matrix-like senario... You'd want to have a lot more movies if you could watch each of them each in a fraction of a second.
Well, now I'm drawing a blank, but that's not bad for what I could come up with in a few minutes. I'm sure in a few years time I could have an incredibly long list.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Sometimes there was even one head per track (fixed in position) which improved performance by eliminating seek times.
There's a photo of drum storage about halfway down the following article (which I found more interesting and more informative than TFA): http://www.moah.org/exhibits/archives/brains/compu terage.html
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