Hard Drive Turns Fifty

3 comments

Rate

Paddy O'Flanigan Power-User Join Date: Feb 2005 Posts: 255 Good Answers: 2	Hard Drive Turns Fifty 09/21/2006 11:26 AM
	Lat wednesday, September 15th, the hard drive turned 50. Here is and interesting timeline showing the evolution of the hard drive.
	Register to Reply
	Pathfinder Tags: hard drive IBM seagate western digital

Interested in this topic? By joining CR4 you can "subscribe" to
this discussion and receive notification when new comments are added.

Randall Guru Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Hemel Hempstead, UK Posts: 5826 Good Answers: 322	#1 Re: Hard Drive Turns Fifty 09/22/2006 4:34 AM
	1956: IBM ships the first hard drive in the RAMAC 305 system. The drive holds 5MB of data at $10,000 a megabyte. The system is as big as two refrigerators and uses 50 24-inch platters. This would have held about one and a half MP3 tracks: so I guess that trying to explain the concept of an MP3 player to guys back then would have been a bit difficult. __________________ If you spend all your time looking for people and things to complain about: trust me, you will find plenty to complain about.
	Register to Reply

jowens Power-User Join Date: Nov 2005 Location: Princess Anne, Maryland USA Posts: 184	#2 Re: Hard Drive Turns Fifty 09/22/2006 7:51 AM
	My latest PC has An "AMD" processor and a 200Gig Hard Drive. Imagine the floor space it would have required to accomidate that back in the day. Now it all fits comfortably under my desk. __________________ “The problems we face cannot be solved with the same level of thinking we had when they were created” Albert Einstein
	Register to Reply

mgaulin The Architect Join Date: Dec 2004 Location: GlobalSpec, Troy NY Posts: 386 Good Answers: 5	#3 Re: Hard Drive Turns Fifty 09/22/2006 9:03 AM
	Forget hard drives, my first two computers didn't even have floppy drives! They used cassette tape for storage. The first time I saw a hard drive was at a friend's house… he had a 5MB Winchester drive (about as big as a toaster oven) that he used to run his BBS. (That's a Bulletin Board System for you post-internet folks. Your computer modem dialed (at 300 baud) the phone number of the BBS's computer directly, and if someone else was connected, you got a busy signal. Funny thing is, the software it ran made it feel a lot like a community site like CR4, but without any graphics.) __________________ Mark Gaulin
	Register to Reply

Copy to Clipboard

jowens (1); mgaulin (1); Randall (1)

You might be interested in: PCMCIA Hard Drive Cards, Hard Drives, Gate Drive Transformers

	Got Something to Say?
	Ask a Question Start a Discussion

	Search this Forum
	Communications & Electronics: Go

	Aerospace
	BioMech & BioMed
	Chemical & Material Science
	Civil Engineering
	Communications & Electronics
	Education and Engineering Careers
	Electrical Engineering
	General Discussion
	Instrumentation
	Manufacturing
	Mechanical Engineering
	New Technologies & Research
	Software & Programming
	Sustainable Engineering
	Transportation

	Site Directories
	Forum Directory Blog Directory User Group Directory RSS Feeds CR4 Rules of Conduct CR4 FAQ Site Glossary Who's Online (66 right now) Show Members