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IBM's first hard drive (1956)


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A whopping 5mb LOL... crazy how far things have come as I sit here looking at my 32gb ipad, 16gb iphone, my camera sporting dual memory and a combined 65gb of storage. And even crazier is that in a few more years more memory in less space will happen.

 

xlg_ibm_ramac.jpg

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My tiny Mac Mini sitting on my desk 7" x 7" and about 1.5" high has 1TB worth of storage as well as an I7 processor and ram and a video card and a fan and and and. :willy:

 

It's amazing how quickly things have evolved. IBM was/is a leader in that field too.

 

I remember my dad coming home in the 1980's with a back up of the system at work. He had two large 12"+ cartridges that he'd bring home in a Cinemax bag... MEMORIES... Forgive the pun...

 

Chris

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It's not just the incredible amount of data that can be stored into such small devices now, but also the speed. My SSD in my gaming rig FLIES. Loads up anything I throw at it unbelievably quickly, and mine is a more lower end model.

 

Crazy where tech has come in honestly just about a decade or two.

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Wow! Time flies!

 

The second full time job I had came with the title of "Computer Operator", sat in a computer room and ran reports, loaded paper, unloaded paper, ran processing jobs, etc. We had IBM 3370 diskdrives, two strings(rows) of them, 4 in each string. Each unit was roughly 2 ft wide, 3.5 ft high and 3 ft deep. Each unit held a whopping 571 MB. So this very large room, with special air conditioning and special electrical supply had a whopping 4.5GB of storage. Big stuff back in the 1980s!

 

Now we can carry 64GB on a little compact flash card that we insert into a camera! :willy:

 

Can't believe the hard disc has changed so much since then!

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This is the IBM 305 RAMAC, the very first computer to contain a hard disc drive. It weighed over a ton and stored….WAIT FOR IT…5 MBs OF DATA!

 

928c41fd.jpg

 

If I understand my history and old computers properly, what is in that pic is just one piece of the RAMAC 305 system, that is the disc drive only. There was another cabinet, roughly the same size that was the CPU. Each subsystem was a separate cabinet and the cabinets would be linked via these cables that were roughly 1 to 1.5" in diameter. A system would typically consist of at least 2 cabinets, the CPU and the storage unit. You would also add on punch card units, the standard data storage before the disc drive appeared on the scene. The punch card unit was necessary to input data, there was not other way to enter data into the disc drive

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That picture is great. We have roughly 230 give or take a few computers on the Airbus and there they are loading ONE component of ONE state of the Art Computer on an old PanAm what looks like a DC6 Aircraft Wow.

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This fascinates me so much I can't stop making the comparisons... so I have sitting here on my desk an apple time capsule with 2 terabytes of storage. Its about 7.5"x7.5"X1.25".

 

So in 2012 I can store the same amount of information in that small of an area in my home where it would have taken 419,430 of that IBM drive to handle the same amount of storage!!! NuTz!! :willy:

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This fascinates me so much I can't stop making the comparisons... so I have sitting here on my desk an apple time capsule with 2 terabytes of storage. Its about 7.5"x7.5"X1.25".

 

So in 2012 I can store the same amount of information in that small of an area in my home where it would have taken 419,430 of that IBM drive to handle the same amount of storage!!! NuTz!! :willy:

 

It is incredible how much technology has progressed!!

 

The amount of data storage that is in large data centers now is incredible. Just think of how much data storage you have sitting on your desk, now consider that multiplied a hundred fold for an entire rack of storage, then consider these data centers that hold hundreds or even thousands of racks. Buildings humming with tens of thousands of disk drives that make our internet possible, to make things like this forum possible. iCloud, YouTube, GoogleDocs, hotmail, photobucket, gmail, ..., all these free things we use everyday consume enormous amounts of data and storage. Data and knowledge are multiplying at an incredible rate.

 

Those first disk drives has access times well over 100-150ms where access time = the time needed for the drive to move the actuator arm and find the information. Now the drives are incredibly fast and a time of 100ms is considered way too slow to find a server across the country on the public internet.

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