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The 305 RAMAC — First Commercial Hard Drive
Captain DaFt writes "Snopes.com has an article that gives an interesting look back at the first commercial hard drive, the IBM 350. Twice as big as a refrigerator and weighing in at a ton, it packed a whopping 4.4MB! Compare that to the 1-4GB sticks that most of us have on our keychains today."
Wow, I remember my first hard drive for the TRS-80 Model II that I had. It was a 5MB primary hard disk system that required you to turn a key to power it on, then wait while it ran up sounding like a jet engine before you pressed the "active" button to enable reading and writing. The cool thing about it was that you could actually hack it and get it to work on my later Apple ][+ that I used throughout junior high, high school and half of college before replacing it with a Mac IIci. Oh yeah, it weighed about 20 lbs and was in a case bigger than the Apple ][+ case alone. Finally, the interesting thing is that Kryder's law has been maintained over time like Moore's law and it is stunning how much storage space money buys these days. I seem to recall that original 5MB Tandy hard drive costing somewhere in the neighborhood of $4000, and for that money I can now buy ~16TB of storage like this setup in my office.
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Who's ever going to need all that space? :-)
Arguing with an engineer is like wrestling a pig in the mud. After a while, you realize the engineer enjoys it.
Compare that to the 1-4GB sticks that most of us have on our keychains today.
Wow, yes. Storage density has increased over time. Amazing. I never noticed that before.
pen drive: will fit in my pocket
RAMAC: will maybe fit in my kitchen
pen drive: holds quite a bit of data
RAMAC: can't hold that much data
pen drive: cannot be used as cover in a gun fight
RAMAC: essentially is a battlement worthy of any castle
AND THE WINNER IS....... RAMAC! I know I want a storage device that protect me from sundry projectiles.
I got a catholic block.
According to the photo in the article, it was also a portable drive.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Those 1-4GB usb drives will be a joke in the not too distant future too.
Well, it has never been successfully tested.
I'm sick of storing all my porn on punchcards.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
My brother, who is largely computer illiterate but finally got a machine the other year has had his hard drive die.
... sometimes it just boggles my mind what people can buy now. Hell, your average pharmacist will have GB+ memory cards for digital cameras for about $25 nowadays.
So, he was telling me that he figured he could get 2 GB of RAM and 500GB HD for $150. At first, I didn't believe him; then I checked prices, then I almost fell over.
Having personally paid $600+ for 16MB of RAM (and thinking it was a good deal) the fact that for less than $200 you can buy that much stuff shocks me.
Having had computers whose memory was measured in K, that didn't have hard drives, and whose CPU speeds were measured in single-digit Hz
Every now and then when I stop to realize how far we've come it just bakes my noodle! =)
Cheers
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
All that 1940s-50s-60s IBM gear was fun to watch. I think they designed it that way on purposes. The mechanical engineering in those things was as impressive as the electrical engineering. I only saw a RAMAC once, when I was in high school, on a gee-whiz tour of an IBM office... it was, I think, in White Plains, New York, but might have been in New York City.
It only had a single head, so it basically move in two dimensions. It would retract all the way out from the stack of disks then zip quickly to another disk and insert itself to read the other disk. During the visit I briefly saw it "vibrating" crazily back and forth on one of the disks. It was explained to me that it was copying a file.
They all had those great big lighted buttons; separate on and off buttons, no push-on-push-off nonsense. the "on" button was always slightly recessed, while the "off" button always projected slightly, so that any one accidentally bumping against the machine would be turning it off rather than on...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Two basic reasons. First of all, the basic overhead costs like packaging and shipping are basically fixed, regardless of the capacity of the hard drive. While they have little effect on the cost of a $200 item, they'd eat you alive trying to sell hard drives for $20.
The second reason is closely related: the cost of building a hard drive depends relatively little on its capacity. You can predict the cost of the drive fairly accurately based only on its form factor. Yes, as the capacity goes up things like the heads and the coatings on the platters change, but they don't change the cost all that much. Obviously when you put more platters in a drive, the cost goes up, but within the typical 1/3 ht. form factor, you don't have room for enough platters to cause anything like an order of magnitude difference in cost.
The universe is a figment of its own imagination.
Truly Moore's Law is an amazing thing.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
...even the simplest computer took up six city blocks, and was over ten storeys tall if you included the intercooler arrays.
My sixteen brothers and sisters had to walk forty-six kilometers through the blistering snow to even reach the keyboard, and then even when you did each key required over nine pounds per inch of pressure to depress them. And, since this was before Dvorak composed his famous New World symphony, the keys were always arranged in a completely random order.
Next we would chop wood and heft it into the boiler to keep the computer going, pausing only to replace vaccuum tubes or to put in a few hours at a Dickensian sweat-shop in order to afford that previous penny to buy us a sasperilly to share between us.
We all had tuberculosis, of course, which was the style at the time.
But did we complain? No, we didn't. We performed floating point calculations by tying little knots in the tatters from our pants, and rendered sums for the differential equations the war effort needed to bomb out the Nazis. How much RAM did we have, you ask? We had 1 bit. Today my grandson complains when his WoW refresh rates are too low, but back then we made out just fine with 1 bit of RAM and a box of Cracker Jacks.
Monochrome? We could only dream. Our display was semichrome. And our printer? His name was Guttenberg.
Man, those were the days.
These stories are free but worth money.
... does it run Linux Interestingly enough in this instance that's a good question.My initial response to this was "of course it does, stop being a troll" like many others commenting with this over-played cliche.
I then thought about it harder and realized there aren't many distros that run in less than 5MB. There are distros that do it, but not many unless they're hardware router disks. This gave me the gut feeling that the answer may be yes, but then I remembered... this is well before x86 architecture became mainstream.
I then looked into the architecture of the 305 RAMAC and found a decent wikipedia article on the subject. Among the interesting things about the architecture is that characters were only 7 bits! FTLA: Each character was 7 bits, composed of two zone bits ("X" and "O"), four BCD bits for the value of the digit, and an odd parity bit ("R") in the following format: X O 1 2 4 8 R With that being said I HIGHLY doubt any form of BSD or Unix was developed for this machine and thus the ability to run Linux is also highly unlikely.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Not to date myself, but boy that brings back memories. I started in this business in the mid 1960s a decade after this IBM disk. We used magnetic drums and head-per-track disks for storage. That makes the IBM unit with moving heads truly advanced for 1956. But what a dog it was at 600 ms seek time! Thats milliseconds guys, not microseconds. Six tenths of a second just to move the head.
The drum memories I used had one head per track, as did the head-per-track disks. In that case, seek time is zero (for head movement.) One need only wait for the latency time for the bytes you want to rotate under the head. Depending on rotation speed, latency could be as much as 5 to 15 milliseconds.
The amusing part, when I think back on it, was the way that the hardware design influenced the programming. Suppose you had a clause that looked like: IF X THEN A ELSE B ENDIF. To make your program run as fast as possible, you would arrange it so that the instructions for A and for B would reside on two different tracks at the same azimuthal angle, (right behind the instructions to evaluate IF X.) That way, no matter whether the branch evaluated true or false, one didn't have to wait for additional memory latency to read the next instruction.
We also didn't have room in RAM (core memory or registers at that time) to store data or calculated results. We had as few as 24 bytes of RAM. Thus, each data value also had to be assigned an address on the drum or disk. The location of that address relative to the code which accessed the value had a dramatic impact on program speed.
Therefore, to optimize programs for running speed, we spent more time devising optimum ways to store the code and data fragments on the drum or disk, than we did designing the functionality of the code. What language and OS did we use? No language, just program the instructions one bit at a time. No OS.
So what fancy apps did we do with this spaghetti software? We did real time control of power plants, both conventional and nuclear. We made flight simulators. We supported the Apollo project to send a man to the moon.
Despite the fact that the computers of those days were as much as 10,000 to 100,000 times slower than today's hardware, the real time applications were only 10 to 100 times slower and/or of lesser scope compared to today's apps. It was because of the extreme squeeze-blood-out-of-a-stone coding methods we used in those days.
For a really good story, get someone to write about how they streamed instructions sequences from earth to the Lunar Excursion Module for Apollo 11. Not streaming video, not music but streaming the code to execute. Buy the time one machine instruction would finish, the next one would be received and read to go. It was just-in-time delivery of the next instruction. That way, they needed no onboard mass storage of any kind. In my book, that was programming heroics that any slashdotter should appreciate.
When will we stop being impressed? Hopefully never, cause when we stop being impressed, then it means we haven't advanced far enough relative to "the good old days."
While I was working for an AeroSpace Sub-contractor in 72/73 we built prototype 38 inch removable HD platters for IBM.
These were built using different core materials (mag V honeycomb) and various bonding materials/techniques.
I don't know if they ever went into production, since I joined the Army before the project was finished.
There I learned to operate a 258lb portable computer - powered by a towed generator - that had 12k of core memory and a 8-level paper tape reader.
"Total domination is bad. The Microsoft dominance already badly misled people about how to choose systems. Instead of 'what tool do I use for the job' it's 'well it was shipped with the box'. Linux is a tool, Windows is a tool and so are numerous other systems. It's really important people go back to looking for the right tool for the job. That will never always be Linux. No single tool can do everything well." Alan Cox