The History Of The Hard Drive

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The fellas over at ThinkComputers have put together a brief write up on the History Of The Hard Drive.

In 1953, engineers in IBM’s California-based laboratory invented the very first hard drive. Since that first disk drive, technological advances have been made at an astonishing rate, with data capacity increasing and size and price decreasing exponentially, year on year. 60 years on, the hard drives of today are unrecognizable from the first models, which took up an entire room.
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I remember playing math blaster on my Magnavox desktop with 100MB HD :eek:
 
my 1st HDD was a 5mb scsi on my Amiga 500. And I do remember my IBM deathstars very well as I cursed at the top of my lungs when each of them croaked...
 
My first HDD was a 40MB, I thought it was very big, with many games fitting on a 1.44MB floppy (although the one I ended up spending most of my time on, Civilization, did take 4 floppies). My mother has stories of computers without hard drives, she had to load the OS from 2 floppies before she could load a program from another floppy and start work !
 
tmillszero1 said:
my 1st HDD was a 5mb scsi on my Amiga 500. And I do remember my IBM deathstars very well as I cursed at the top of my lungs when each of them croaked...
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Ugh, I remember the 20MB SCSI with the fat A500 addon port on the side... more to the point, I remember how much fucking money I spent on it... *sigh*
 
Forget the brand. Bought a 20MB HD for 300 bucks in 1988. Was such a huge upgrade from running off floppies.
 
My first HD was 15MB for an Atari 1040 ST!

My First Floppy disk(it held 90k) was a Percom for Atari 8-bit. It was my 1983 graduation present..such a geek...price $300. I still have it and it still works, 30 years later!
 
My first hard drive was a Seagate ST-506 which was a 5MB formatted MFM hard drive. God I feel old now. The oldest hard drive I still have somewhere around here is a Seagate ST-225 20MB drive.
 
I'm a bit younger, but my first drive was 100MB in an AMD 386 that he handed down to me when he got his AMD 486. And now I sit with some 20TB of storage between my computers.
 
Talking about feeling old... I remember loading programs from tape - cassette tape - on one of the first TRS-80 Model I with 4k RAM and level 1 BASIC.

mwroobel said:
My first hard drive was a Seagate ST-506 which was a 5MB formatted MFM hard drive. God I feel old now. The oldest hard drive I still have somewhere around here is a Seagate ST-225 20MB drive.
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Yeah, the old workhorse ST-225! Anyone who has ever sat next to one for hours on end knows they have a very distinctive seek sound. Listen carefully to any "computer room" scene on TV or in the movies and chances are you will hear the sound of an ST-225 seeking st some point.
 
RedWagnum said:
Talking about feeling old... I remember loading programs from tape - cassette tape - on one of the first TRS-80 Model I with 4k RAM and level 1 BASIC.



Yeah, the old workhorse ST-225! Anyone who has ever sat next to one for hours on end knows they have a very distinctive seek sound. Listen carefully to any "computer room" scene on TV or in the movies and chances are you will hear the sound of an ST-225 seeking st some point.
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The TSR-80 color computer with tape was my first as well. I remember discovering that a "high rez" screen would only show about 2/3's down before it ran out of memory. LOL!.
 
my first hdd quantum fireball 20gb.

When I bought this everyone said to my father that i did not need this..I used this for storing tv episode, mp3 etc. :(
 
My first system was also a Tandy with cassete storage (boy that sucked). The first system I had with a HDD was a 100MB drive in the 386 I got in 9th grade. Needed to delete Windows 3.1 off the drive just to have room to install some games.
 
No mention of the uber 10MB MFM or 20MB RLL drives? Whats up?
 
Skripka said:
Whipper snapper.

Playing Falcon 3.0 on my 386 system with 640k RAM was the bomb.
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Nah, it was playing text only "Adventure" on a TI-990 mini in 1979. You could have it either on thermal printer or CRT.
 
darkpaw said:
My first system was also a Tandy with cassete storage (boy that sucked). The first system I had with a HDD was a 100MB drive in the 386 I got in 9th grade. Needed to delete Windows 3.1 off the drive just to have room to install some games.
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LOL! My "first system" back in college was an IBM 360/50, with 2314 removable removable drives, which held 29 MB in a pack. Back then you could remove the drive platters from the drive itself. http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/storage/storage_2314.html

Oh. You input your programs on punch cards.:rolleyes:

Boy do I feel old now. :eek:
 
I have a Nashua 4462 Disk Pack, 80Mb from 1968. Its 14" wide with 5 platters. Made in USA Nashua NH if you can believe that. The machine was used for it was about 4 feet tall and cost $50,000 back in the day I was told. Also heard that some disk packs used to spin at 10,000 rpm. Sometimes the clips would snap and 14inch platters spinning at 10,000 rpm would fly off and go though walls and even kill people lol. I got it from a fellow that used to work on them back in 1968 in the service. He's 70 years old now and still works in the IT field everyday.

I wish could turn this thing on.
 
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