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."

Comments

Back of the Envelope Calculation

[Jazzer_Techie]

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!

Re:Back of the Envelope Calculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Neat. Let's do the same calculation with the 50-year old drive. It has 5 mega-bytes = 5 x 10e6 bytes or approximately 5*10e7 bits. The storage unit is "the size of two refrigerators" or (my guess) 5' wide by 6' high by 3' deep or 5*6*3 = 90 cubic feet or 90*12e3 = 155520 cubic inches. 155530 / 5*10e7 = 1/321. Therefore the 50-year old drive had (very approximately) an average of 321 bits per cubic inch. .wk.

Re:What, no pictures?

[Albanach]

Most newspapers are used to bying rights to a picture for use in a single issue, for print purposes and for distrobution in a single market. Because they license dozens or hundreds of such images each day tey know exactly what they're getting into. Equally press photographers are used to licensing on this basis too.

When you need to license for the web you need extended rights - how long will you keep the article available for, across multiple markets. Newspapers are getting better at this, and will continue to do so, especially as they derive more and more revenue from the internet. For now though, we just have to wait.

Re:What, no pictures?

[Nicholas Burns]

another beautiful thing about the internet: google image search!
http://images.google.com/images?q=ibm+ramac

more info

[wjsroot]

check this out:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/05/19/1956-fir st-hard-drive-5mb/
its an ibm document about the drive (and some other hard ware)
It has a picture, and some more technical info!

Re:Butterfly test

[Amazing Quantum Man]

Walking drives predate 1990 by many years.

They've been part of the Jargon File since its inception.

Re:What, no pictures?

[darkfish32]

wikipedia has a nice article on the subject, here, with at least one great picture.

or google image, like suggested above, though it is disappointing the original article didn't have pictures of the giants

Re:Punch Cards?

[loose electron]

Magentic tape already existed at the time, no need for that.

The whole idea was "random access" not "serial access" - punch cards and mag tape you need to shuffle thru the pile of cards, or run down the tape end to end.

Restoration Effort Underway

[bnavarro]

It seems that the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center is currently restoring(PDF) one of only four remaining RAMACs to a functioning state.