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The Hard Drive Turns 50

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the but-it-still-feels-10 dept.

JHU writes "When the hard drive was first introduced on September 13, 1956, it required a humongous housing and 50 24-inch platters to store 1/2400 as much data as can be fit on today's largest capacity 1-inch hard drives. Back then, the small team at IBM's San Jose-based lab was seeking a way to replace tape with a storage mechanism that allowed for more-efficient random access to data. The question was, how to bring random-access storage to business computing?"

1 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Code name was Ethel by BadAnalogyGuy · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's kind of a strange coincidence that the codename for the hard drive project was Ethel because the same day that these huge hunks of iron were debuted was the day that Hurrican Ethel formed in the Gulf of Mexico (it made landfall the next day in Mississippi).

    These days we're talking about capacities that can hold all the information of every hurricane evar on a single disk. What a ways we've come.