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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!
"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.
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
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.
Then you have the interesting problems of random access to the cards and re-writable cards.
Not criticizing you, just taking the idea further.
It's not offtopic, dumbass. It's orthogonal.
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 ?
Well, let's see... apologies in advance for getting the numbers wrong, I always mess up my conversions (but it doesn't matter as you'll see at the end).
But 5 Mb = 5 242 880 bytes = 41 943 040 bits (that is assuming I got it right)
Now, I don't know exactly what sort of resolution you had on punch cards, but it's probably fair to assume that, including padding, a centimeter squared would do per bit. so you need 41 943 040 cm^2 = 4 194.304 square meters of punch cards. Now say, just for the sake of the argument, that your punch cards are 30x 30 = 900cm^2, you would need 46 603.3777.... of them. And then it all boils down to how thin your punch cards can be, but just intuitively, I'd say, yeah, you can easily fill up that space with 5Mb worth of punch cards.
But then again, you are missing the entire point. Punch cards are not rewritable, hard disks are and that is the innovative bit. So it doesn't matter whether or not you can put punch cards in that space, it's all about being able to reuse said space.
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?
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"
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.
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"!
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
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.
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
5MB = 5 x 1024 x 1024 x 8 bits, which would require 43,690.67 cards. That's about 9 boxes of cards, at 5,000 cards per box; or 25 linear ft of 'deck' . I'd say the punch card density was about 4 times better than the hard drive (not allowing for the size of the card reader/punch though).
At 1,000 cards per minute read speed (although some readers ran at 1,400 or better) it would require 44 minutes just to read the cards, i.e. a transfer rate of 16kps. It would be challenging to play an MP3 off that.
Now. imagine Vista on punch cards...
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
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.
The first two boxes of cards check that they're being run on the correct reader, and that they're Genuine (TM) IBM cards. Then, the next 500 boxes get fed into the machine, only to gum up the feed mechanism before anything productive gets done.
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.
probably not harddrives... maybe flash but i dont see harddrives being portable as CD's are... damn magnets everywhere... and strong em fields... bye bye data
(yes i know i suck at spelling fell free to correct my grammar and/or spellin i dont care, im still not going to change
It seems that the Magnetic Disk Heritage Center is currently restoring(PDF) one of only four remaining RAMACs to a functioning state.
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