Web News: The Hard Drive turns Fifty!

Lokie · 13-September-06, 07:56 PM

I couldn't believe no one has posted this, so I jumped on this little piece of history.

The hard drive turns 50

Quote:


	On Sept. 13, 1956, an IBM lab at 99 Notre Dame Road in San Jose began shipping a product that changed history. It is Silicon Valley's unsung hero, though it taught us bits and the mega, giga, tera, peta and exa bytes. Dubbed RAMAC, or Random Access Method of Accounting and Control, it was the original hard drive, a funny-looking giant machine with 50 spinning, 24-inch-wide disks covered with red paint. It cost about $50,000 a year to lease in 1956 dollars -- equivalent to nearly $350,000 today -- and had 5 megabytes of information, about enough space to store one song on an iPod.

s1ugh34d · 13-September-06, 09:16 PM

WOW, strangely enough another apexer did post it after you did here, but those things are crazy, they actuall had replacement spindles for the ones that broke or died, and to think that was small compared to the rooms for computers they had then

I actually held one of those spindles before we had one on display at my old vo-tech and its not a lightweight disk could easieily be thrown and cause damage to another, and to think computers arent dangerous, nice to see computers actually are aging, and slowly becoming history

THRiLL KiLL · 14-September-06, 07:14 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by s1ugh34d


	WOW, strangely enough another apexer did post it after you did here, but those things are crazy, they actuall had replacement spindles for the ones that broke or died, and to think that was small compared to the rooms for computers they had then I actually held one of those spindles before we had one on display at my old vo-tech and its not a lightweight disk could easieily be thrown and cause damage to another, and to think computers arent dangerous, nice to see computers actually are aging, and slowly becoming history

yeah i did one too. it just makes you wonder, how much space it held, and how much it cost!!

13-September-06, 09:16 PM		#2 (permalink)
s1ugh34d Apex Tech God	Re: Web News: The Hard Drive turns Fifty! WOW, strangely enough another apexer did post it after you did here, but those things are crazy, they actuall had replacement spindles for the ones that broke or died, and to think that was small compared to the rooms for computers they had then I actually held one of those spindles before we had one on display at my old vo-tech and its not a lightweight disk could easieily be thrown and cause damage to another, and to think computers arent dangerous, nice to see computers actually are aging, and slowly becoming history

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