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50th Anniversary of the First Hard Drive
ennuiner writes "Over at Newsweek Steven Levy has a column commemorating IBM's introduction of the first hard drive 50 years ago. The drive was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, and had a vast 5MB capacity. They also discuss the future of data storage." From the article: "Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home. Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry."
I'll never use up so much space!
I can see in 10 years from now instead of medium like disks (dvd, bluray, hd-dvd, cds) everything will be stored on harddrives because of the constant advances in technology.
"Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home. Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry..." ...this probably means that we're about to hit a development wall. We know how good experts are at predicting these kinds of things.
What the fuck is this, some new trusted computing drm scheme I never heard of?
Five MEGABYTES? Holy crap! My 5.25" floppy disks only hold 170K!!
(my thoughts during the reign of Commodore)
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
...and when was the first hard drive crash?
Does anyone know?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
The drive was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, and had a vast 5MB capacity.
Couldn't they have made an optical punch card reader that would fit into the space of two refrigerators? And stored 5MB worth of punch cards?
I'm not criticizing, just asking if that technology was around 50 years ago.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Sadly, I still have my first hard drive. A 20 meg RLL monster I purchased some 20 odd years ago. I can't just throw it away. I had to finance that sucker -- it ran me nearly $900 (more like $1400 after interest). And it STILL works.
So it sits on my shelf, collects dust and I complain about not being able to throw it away... And my belly-aching about it started when I picked up my first video card which had more memory than my first hard drive. I'm sure those two events aren't unrelated.
Not if the MPAA, RIAA, and BSA have their way,you won't. You'll RENT software, not own it, you'll pay-for-play music and video, and you will be THANKFUL for the privilege of doing so!
Thankfully, I think that the **AA and BSA will utimately lose.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Remember, Get Perpendicular
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
With a terabyte HDD, I surely hope they finally find some way to dramatically increase the transfer rates. We haven't seen much change in that in quite a while.
Saying that the hard drive was invented 50 years ago implies that before that people used floppies. In fact, this was the first disk drive of any kind.
That linked page shows a pic of the guy who wrote the story, several ads for magazines etc, an illustration with some distant link to the story, but what we all want are some pics of those huge disks. What's up with all those newspaper guys, haven't they learned yet that the web loves pictures? They (and by that I mean nearly every website of a newspaper all over the world) as if they just moved all their text-only content to the web without understanding those amazing new possibilities in the first place - and with the web now over 10 years old, I'm really starting to doubt if they will ever learn.
the pr0n industry..... i dont know anyone with a TB of word files.... i guess when office 2012 comes out the files will all be 20 megs for 1 line or text, but until that day, HD pr0n here we cum!!!
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
I was just curious about how big a bit is going to be on these new drives, so I did a quick back of the envelope calculation (I actually used a scrap of paper bag.)
Let's take jewlery-sized to mean 1 cm^2 of usable area. And take 100s of GB to be 100 GB, or 10^11 bytes, so ~10^12 bits. Pop these in a 10^6 x 10^6 grid. Then we have 10^-2 / 10 ^ 6 = 10^-8 m to be the length/width of a bit. A hydrogen atom is ~ 10^-10m (I think Iron is ~2.5 times that size). So roughly, bits would be a maximum of 100 x 100 atoms, but probably more towards 50 x 50.
That is pretty small!
"Kryder of Seagate and Healy of Hitachi assure us that new disk-drive features like built-in encryption will protect copyright holders and our own personal records."
so the drives themselves will prevent us from copying media TO them and/or prevented us from copying stuff FROM them ?
what's the potential for abuse here ? try to upgrade to windows BlindenessXP2010 with a leaked key and it'll tell the HD to lock all your files... scary though, isn't it ?
no thanks. i want my terabyte SATA IV disk to be a plain data storage thingie with no stings attached or any sort of "copy protection" or encription. I'll handle data-protection on software myself
What ? Me, worry ?
...and Hard Drives were *real* hardrives, and programmers were neurotic from writing code that had to take into account the spinning of the hard-drive and time their data accesses so that operations in a loop didn't wind up waiting for 2/3 of a physical rotation on each cycle...
When I was a youngen we only had 8" drives .. and we liked it.
Actually I last used 8" drives in a commerical system in 1986 . not so long ago.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
And we'll probably be celebrating the arrival of Terabyte drives this year as well. Don't you love progress?
Oh hard drives how you curse me.
I love these things and I hate them, as an enthusiast I've always been a big fan of the high performance hard disk. I've done my best to learn about them, I've theorised about ways of speeding them up, I've discussed the technology with friends for hours at a time in a geek like fasion.
As much as I love a fast hard disk and I love a big hard disk I also hate these hard disks, because ultimately it's a very old fasioned method of storing our data, it's just some magnetic disc spinning same as it did 50 years ago.
When you really think about it, it's just a really extreme tape drive with better random access, there's moving parts, it's delicate, they can run hot, they can be noisy etc.
I recall my C64 as a boy, sure it had that weird "computer high pitch whine" to it but when the 1541-II wasn't reading data that baby was pretty damn quiet, I miss those days and hard disks don't help.
What we need is to finally see the end of the hard disk, some new method of storing data, something which holds more, reads and writes faster, less delicate and no moving parts - of course solid state sucks right now but damnit I recall discussing holographic drives storing data on a small cube the size of a peice of sugar at 2tb or something (so the rumours went, like 5 or 10 years ago)
The oven had the microwave replace it with a whole new tech, the television had the LCD / plasma, sending data has gone (at points) from copper to light - cmon where's the magnetic storage replacement, something to put us in the 21'st century?
So in conclusion, I love them but I also hate them - it's really time for something new,...
One of my friends told me a story about one of those ancient hard drives (I believe he said it was from a professor) with the gigantic platters in the huge boxes. Well apparently, the drive head was moving back and forth fast enough to really shake the cabinet, which ended up dislodging one of the platters, which broke free from its case, rolled across the hallway of the building where it was being stored, then proceeded to smash through a brick wall and finally land on top of an employee's car in the adjacent parking lot completely crushing a good portion of it. I have my doubts if this was actually true, but it's still damn funny.
Yeah, because the hard drive is the new bling.
In 1990, we had some brand new HP disks the size of a washing machine. Capacity 650MB.
Some software was written to move the head assembly from end to end. This would cause so much vibration the the whole machine would "walk" around.
The machine room had video cameras, and sometimes if you saw some maintenance people in the machine room, you would launch the "Butterfly test" on all the drives. They would come alive like a bad horror movie, and all walk around. The poor maintenance person would try to run out befor the exit got blocked.
"Fix it"
Either this is a very witty commentary on the original size of the device or the idiot editor doesn't know how to spell "ferrous". Smart money's on the latter.
How much would one of these refrigerator drives hold today if they used the cutting edge write strategies we use today?
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
All this new storage space will doubtless be quite useful, but I wonder if we're about to get to the point where the network becomes the primary limiting factor in the usefuless of a computer (for most users), rather than the size of the hard drive? Just as memory is now usually the bottleneck, rather than the CPU, I can see that very soon the extra space will exceed that which can be downloaded in a reasonable amount of time (say, a year) - especially in sprawling, predominantly rural countries like the US.
I've played around with the notion of there being "content neutral" downloading services, where people bring in their external hard drives, plug in, and download at very high speeds for a premium, returning in an hour or so (akin to having film developed). This may actually make sense at some point, provided the legal hurdles can be jumped.
The company I worked for while I was in college in the early '80's had my first encounters with hard drives: removable 52MB multi-platter packs in a washing-machine-sized enclosure.
In '84 at my next job, the Lisa HDD was 5MB for either $1500 or $2500, I don't remember exactly. I remember the first hard drives for the Mac whose controllers clipped onto the CPU, and I think ran around $1000 for $20.
I finally cracked down and bought a 20MB drive for a Mac Plus for $600 -- that was a bargain.
When I realize that you can get 4GB microSD cards, and 3" drives in the hundreds of GB for just a few hundred bucks, it's pretty darn amazing.
Design for Use, not Construction!
check this out:r st-hard-drive-5mb/
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/05/19/1956-fi
its an ibm document about the drive (and some other hard ware)
It has a picture, and some more technical info!
Mod others as you would have them mod you.
For all of those not lucky enough to walk into the William Gates Computer Science building at Stanford here's my photo of their 1967 hard disk: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/~ajh/harddisk.jpg. The dark line around the edge is the result of the head crashing into the disk. The disk cost $300,000 and held an impressive 48Mbytes over the 10 inner surfaces of 6 of these platters. Each platter's diameter is over 1m. Disk startup time was 5 minutes, access time was 35msec and transfer speed was 2.7Mb/s!
Stanford actually sued for $580,000 because of this crash and it not working within specifications. One bugbear was that it "cannot be used for longterm storage"!
Couldn't they have made an optical punch card reader that would fit into the space of two refrigerators? And stored 5MB worth of punch cards?
The bit density of this drive was:
Area: 50 platters x pi()x (r=.305m)^2 = 14.6m^2
Bits: 5MB x 10b/B=50,000,000 bits + a few for housekeeping
Density: ~4 bits/mm^2
This is similar to 8 track 128CPI tape. Ticker tape or punchcard certainly had much lower density.
With this density you could actually see the bits directly with a magnetic loupe, and read off the data visually.
"Fix it"
There's a reason we're also still using the combustion engine: it's cheap and it works. It's also been vastly improved over time.
It's like you're saying your Honda Accord needs to be replaced by some new technology because it's the same thing as a Model T. It's obviously not. And the technology nor infrastructure does not yet exist to efficiently replace it.
The same concept applies here. We'll have something "new" as you say when the technology is available at a reasonable price.
To quote the mighty bash.org
[ikkenai] i don't have hard drives. i just keep 30 chinese teenagers in my basement and force them to memorize numbers
Heres a picture of the original production version:
e /storage_PH0350A.html
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storag
I met Reynold Johnson about 15 years back, (he died a while back) he ran the first design program developing this thing.
Some did not believe in it's viability back then. Somebody posted a picture of a bologna slicer on the side of the engineering prototype. The only thing in common between the original and the current methods are spinning disks. Everything else has changed in its approach.
They have been predicting the demise of the disk drive for 20 years. However the cost per byte (or mega,giga,tera,peta-byte) of magnetic storage stays ahead of the cost curve, and thus perserveres.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
I realise that nothing is out there yet which can replace it, that doesn't stop one hoping, especially with every couple of years an "amazing new technology" being announced but never making it to market.
The other problem is, right now if "they" released something which was bigger, faster, lighter, quieter than hard disks, it would either cost a boatload and fail or if it was priced correctly - destroy the hard disk industry as we know it over night.
I'm not much for conspiracy theories,...however I'm sure we've all heard that the automative industry would die overnight if the right engine were to be released (should it exist)- billions of dollars in re-tooling and re-designing thousands of types of cars would have to be done, all the old stock would be useless etc - so research comes in dribs and drabs rather than huge changes.
The same theory I think would apply to hard disks, perhaps there is something that could be done right now, who knows - but either way if it's introduced the wrong way it'll screw a huge industry, hence I'm sure they aren't working "as hard as possible" on a replacement,...
One can dream.
Umm, guys, csirac beat them to it by about 7 years. See:
s tats.html (note the "disk capacity" spec - 2048 words in 1949).g raphic/disc.jpg
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/dept/about/csirac/
http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/dept/about/csirac/
Or is this article just about commercial hdds?
The oven in my kitchen is a slightly evolved version of ovens 50 years ago. Heck even my microwave is just a slightly improved version of the first microwaves back in the late 70s. Some technologies have advanced, but others have just gotten slightly improved over the years, because as poor as they are, they are still the best. Consider the internal combustion engine. While computer controls have increased reliability and decreased emissions dramatically (and increased power and efficiency), the engine is basically unchanged from what it was in the 1920s. Overhead cams, mulitple valves per cylinder, super and turbo-chargers where around from the 20s. Even fuel injection has been here for years. Yet engines steadily improve in capability and power, even if we're using 100-year-old base technology. Similarly, until solid-state memory gets cheap enough and reliable enough, spinning magnetic disks will likely remain the main storage solution for years to come. And I think that's okay. I don't think it means we're somehow behind. No matter what technology comes along, I will always have a love/hate relationship with it.
Since I suggested the story, I feel a little defensive and want to respond. The title of the article is "The Hard Disk That Changed the World," so if the language is sloppy, the sloppiness is on the part of Newsweek and not me. Since you're being picky, I'll point out that it's spelled "ubiquitous," not "ubiguitous."
Somebody please, tell this machine I'm not a machine.
My pr0N collection would require a disk farm the size of Rhode Island. Now that is progress.
The RAMAC was a self-contained computer. It went nowhere. The drives that actually caused a change in computing were the 5MB "pizza platter" drives on the 360, 10 years after the RAMAC. My college roommate used to go home one weekend a month to spend Sunday with his father (DP manager of a major company) backing up the RAMAC onto punch cards. He said it took all day and about 2 six-packs. Dick.
your hard disk, or are you just happy to see me? *rimshot*
it's really time for something new
I think it's too soon to expect something to change just because it's now the "21st Century". There are alternatives if you are serious enough about using them, but the reality is that you must resign yourself to the fact that it is the best tool for the job. If there was something else that was more economical, then it would probably be in dominant use. Frankly, hard drives work well enough, IMO, and have an unbeatable value in cost, number of re-writes and capacity. I really don't get many failures in the long run, only one case of hard drive death and that was more or less infant mortality. I do keep regular backups but that's because I value my data and don't want to tempt fate to a theft, corruption, mechanical or electrical failure.
You should also understand that many of the principles of how things work have been established long ago, generally what we have are refinements, usually an idea isn't abandoned just because it is old. I mean, how old is the wheel? Are you going to demand that something else take its place?
The article claims that the magnetic disk was the first mass storage with random access, but that's not true. Magnetic drums were also random access and were available a few years earlier.
I'magine how much PR()N u cn put on that. how many piccies of prepubescent pricks and dicks and
UUUUUMM i want to suckkk and suck and fuckk-k-k and cum all over
uuuugghh I am an unemployable shut in nerd with 300gigaums of Elvira pr0n
They've really had to engineer a new way to capture and store data on the Large Hadron Collider. Here's what excites the crap out of me. The two biggest obstacles standing in our way with regard to real teleportation are the little matter of tearing apart a being, and then storing the information about that being and transmitting it.
The folks at LHC have had to come up with whole new ways to capture data regarding the proton collisions. It is said that they'll generate the contect of 10,000 Encyclopedia Brittanica's every minute. So - that would solve storing meta data for say, teleportation.
Magnetic media is in many cases better than the current alternatives at the moment, and this is where your own analogy can explain. While microwave ovens made cooking more convenient, it certainly hasn't replaced ovens-- nearly every house nowadays has both. Microwave ovens aren't very good at producing the yummy browning that ovens and ranges produce, and so ovens, despite their relative age as a technology, are still around. The same thing goes for CRTs-- LCDs are getting closer at producing the same wide gamut and contrast that CRTs do, but they're not there quite yet; and the ones that are close are very expensive.
The older technologies are still around because they're either still very useful, or because of another important factor: price. Solid state techology is expensive, and still does not meet the demands of heavy usage that hard drives can provide.
Is that 5MB or 5MiB? hehehehe
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
It seems that the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center is currently restoring(PDF) one of only four remaining RAMACs to a functioning state.
You let the Magic Smoke out ... I'm sorry, your hardware is done now. You'll need to take it in for a recharge.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I just have to share this story with you. Showing my age a little but about 20 odd years ago I worked as a driver for a computer-firm. We were looking after the MAI computers for the Netherlands and Belgium. One day me and my mate went to Brussles in Belgium to pick up a harddrive that was repaired and deliver it back to the customer. Unfortunately the build from which we picked up the drive had a flight of steps leading to the front door. So we needed to carry the drive down the stairs towards the road side.
These drives are build like washing machines with a big heavy chunk of something mounted at the top of them to reduce vibrations. We lifted the drive from the bottom thus creating a rather precarious balancing act with the drive. Well there would not be a story if it didn't go wrong. The drive tipped over forward and we were not able to hold it so it crashed top first into the concrete steps and bounced and slid all the way down right across the pavement passing some surprised pedestrians. The drive came to a halt thanks to a parked Volvo in which the drive put a decent dent.
A very unpleasant phonecall followed.
Anyway, those were pretty rough days. I was promoted to technician (Didn't know shit but the contract said we would be on-site in 4 hours so they send me so that part of the contract was met). I got pretty good.
A customer complained about a beeping Brother daisywheel printer. It printed fine but it beeped. Nothing a pair of side cutters couldn't fix.
The head accountant (In those days they usually filled the role of IT) of a large transport company was in panic because the MAI computer would not boot up and thus could not print out the dispatch lists for the trucks. Harddrives those days were pretty temperature sensitive and this particular cold-room was freezing. So I did my usual. Talk technical and wait for the accountant to piss-off then turn to the computer and with a well aimed kick BOOT it back to live. This procedure could not be performed with a customer present but is was very effective solving 60% of the problems out there. I wonder if Re-booting a computer comes from this practise.
Sometimes the harddrive head needed alignment. This is supposed to be done is a special dust free room. The procedure was simple, you needed a scope and a screwdriver and some doodads. The problem was the availability of a dustfree room. I have adjusted plenty of harddrives on cooperate toilets.
Yep, the good ol' days of computing. Man this was the true IT wild west.
The reason I buy new drives these days is because I don't have enough free time to sort, delete, archive, or just plain finish what I'm doing.
Oh, and the stuck-at-91% pr0n torrents.
Every disk gets full after about 1-1.5 month. It's an unbreachable law, true for every disk that sees some use.
Capacity is irrelevant, the time is pretty much constant.
That doesn't match my experience. I've had 54 GB (4*18, RAID5) for years to store all my projects. They were always full, I regularly had to remove old extracted tar archives and make distclean in some source directories. A year ago, I've upgraded to 146 GB (3*73, RAID5) and now my space went up to 55 GB and has stabilized there for a year now. So my needs seem to be 55 GB, whatever the time. And I'm pretty sure that I'm not the only one in this situation.
Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry.
Um, can't we already do that? I mean, Transflash drives are only 15x11x1 millimetres and can hold 2GB (to date).
The amount of and physical size of flash storage you can buy for less than $100 now is ridiculous.
We always say how DRM sucks etc, whats different about this guy saying it! God!
---
Just what we need, another discussion on everyone talking about how they had the earliest and smallest hard drives, the most antiquated monitors and arcane CPUs which they ran by punching in the commands (all in binary) at 2 second intervals to keep the computer from crashing.
Besides, that doesn't compare to the abacus I used during the Ming Dynasty to perform what were considered 'petaflop' calculations back then...
This ramac seems to be the first practical commericially available disk drive available. You can blame /. for sloppy language but aren't you just as guilty of sloppy research?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...is the limit of the size of the smallest bit posssible. we're getting close to molecular limits.
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
One way of solving the problem of intramolecular forces when the disk head is very close to the surface, is to put metallic rings on the head to make the forces repell it.
Kim0
I recall my C64 as a boy, sure it had that weird "computer high pitch whine" to it but when the 1541-II wasn't reading data that baby was pretty damn quiet, I miss those days and hard disks don't help.
The lack of noise from a hard drive spinning is what you miss? Personally, I miss the OS loading in less than five seconds, and the computer expecting you to type in a computer program instead of letting you run other people's by default. I would have quite enjoyed a hard drive for a computer with 64K of memory, it would have taken a while to fill it up...
Nope. If you build it, they will make data to fill it. Trust me.
I worked with similar large drives described in the article. They were CDC's first drives. The heads were moved by hydraulics and the tracks (cylinders) were counted by an etched opticial disk read by a photocell. Once the head was "on track" then a solenoid would drop a detent pawl into a square toothed gear to hold it on track. All mechanical. No voice coil to move the heads just the hydraulics.
Each disk drive was about the size of a large computer desk and had a capacity of 262KB which is not very much compared with today's disk drives. But compared to a hollerith card it was a lot of storage when comparing to the 80 bytes or even a deck of cards. The operating system at the time was 2K in size which was one box of cards and could easily be contained on the disk drive platter.
By keying in the bootstrap program at the console and pressing "run" then the system would read from a particular location on the disk drive which was the location of the operating system. The program would then execute the code in core and thus the system was up and running.
The worst failure would be a ruptured hydraulic hose spewing hydraulic fluid over the entire guts of the machine. Difficult to clean up... difficult to hold onto slippery parts... and difficult to repair.
There was only limited electronics in the disk drive itself. The controller was a refrigerator size box that held each gate on a separate circuit board. These were troubleshot utilizing a oscilloscope on a cart so it could be moved about. Each input to a gate had a test point and the output(s) also had test points. Each gate (like and, nor etc) was an individual small PC board so a disk controller might have 600 boards in it. One needed to be totally aware of each circuit and how it worked and what the signal at each junction was to be. No board swapping here. One had to know or have a very good idea what the problem was before changing a board lest you have a contoller that is nearly unfixable in very short order.
I was very skilled at repair and yet saw the writing on the wall even then as devices became smaller and "smart".
No longer could one trace the signal from "turn on" button to spindle rotating through each stage and gate. Eventually the "start" button would signal the input to the processor aboard the disk drive and it would be the processor that commanded the spindle to start turning. At this stage troubleshooting became board swapping for the most part.
That is when i moved from the technical hands on realm into programming.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Hard disks today, don't help me enjoy the quiet times of yesterday with the C64, the constant idle spin noise, plus the fans to cool the system.
Sure the drive isn't the primary noise factor (besides seek times) but it's an added ambient noise that I don't enjoy - my C64 was great for quiet.
Those were the days, walk-in CPUs, with every wall covered with slots for boards covered with discrete transistors and such.
Hard disks today, don't help me enjoy the quiet times of yesterday with the C64, the constant idle spin noise, plus the fans to cool the system. Sure the drive isn't the primary noise factor (besides seek times) but it's an added ambient noise that I don't enjoy - my C64 was great for quiet.
That's a good point, the C64 and other 8-bit microcomputers were completely silent. Still, my Mac Mini's only about 20-odd decibels, and roughly the same size too, so things aren't necessarily much worse these days.
Every technolgy has a downside. In either event data backups are required. Only noobs and or idiots would think they are secure until the big byte bites your data in the butt.
As for sloppy research — hey, I didn't research what I wrote, I simply repeated something I'd read many times. If it turns out I'm wrong, well then, I've learned something. It wouldn't be the first time somebody on Slashdot corrected something I was sure was true. Slashdotters should be here to learn, not just to pontificate.
In this particular case, I'm a little sceptical. I mean, this dude also claims to have invented the LP record and an improved form of viagra. Also, priority of invention is often as much about patriotism as technology. Any Brazilian will tell you that the first airplane was flown by Alberto Santos-Dumont, not the Wright brothers. I happen to think Senhor S-D's claim is rather weak — but then, I'm not Brazilian. Or Japanese!
Hard drives used to be huge. As you can see from the article, they used to be as big as a refridgerator.
Back in the days of the PC/AT, hard drives had slimmed down to a "petite" 5.25 inches wide. Hard disks were "full-height," which was the height of two modern 5.25" bays (hence the term "half-height" used to describe modern 5.25" drives).
Over time, hard drives slimmed down to a single 5.25" slot (half-height), then down to the same size as that used by the 3.5" floppy.
Today, many less-expensive desktop drives are actually 2.5" drives in a 3.5" package, because it is cheaper to just produce one smaller platter and use it for both notebook and desktop drives. I am uncertain, however, if we will ever make a complete transition from 3.5" to 2.5" hard drives - at this point, I think we will see a transition to solid-state storage before we see the complete phasing-out of 3.5" drives.
Why did things slim down?
1. It's harder to spin a 5.25" size platter at higher speeds. Access times and maximum data rates depend on spindle speed.
2. It's MUCH more expensive to make larger platters, in much the same way that it's much more expensive to create larger chips. The larger they are, the more exact the process required, and the more chance of defect.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
Quoth CmdrTaco "Less space than a tape. No write-protect ring. Lame."
...was everybody using floppies before?
You would have a card checking if you can even read the next upcoming punch card. ...
;)
And a verification card if your product is genuine,
And a card for your login,
And a card to check if you got enough access to use the punch card reader
When you want to start watching Video Punch Cards (VPC) you will have to use 5 boxes for the restrictions and 1 box for the video
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
The 1541s were quiet because they spun down, not because they were floppy drives.
Modern drives can be spun down too, and usually are in laptops. A modern drive which is in sleep mode is just as quiet than a 1541 in sleep mode.
The convection oven is not dead; far from it. "Television" and display technology are essentially orthogonal, and have been since the introduction of colour TV. Television is far from "replaced"; the audience for broadcast TV signals grows annually. "Copper" and "light" describe different layers: the former is the transmissions medium, the latter is the signal carrier. The comparison would be copper : electrical signals
I have many a fond memory tearing apart computer "junk" in the late 70's that my dad would bring home as "scrap" from Burroughs (before they were Unisys).
120 lb CRT monitors anyone? Teletypes - WITH paper tape?. Wire memory. Core memory, that really used little ferrite cores? That was the stuff.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.