2006_08_01_archive

Hard Disk's 50th Anniversary

Yes, there were hard disks for computers even before I started using

them. Yesterday's Wall Street Journal had a story by Lee Gomes on the

50th anniversary of the hard-disk drive. Worth reading in full, but

here are some excerpts:

[The hard drive] is the storage device that makes possible not only

PCs, but also iPods, TiVos and other consumer technology

must-haves.

The first disk drive, called the RAMAC, was created by

International Business Machines Corp. engineers in San Jose,

Calif., in 1956...

The disks on it were 24 inches in diameter. The whole unit weighed

over a ton, and had to be delivered on forklifts and loaded on to

large cargo bays of airplanes. You had only five megabytes of

storage. That's about five minutes worth of MP3 music...

It was four or five years between the first RAMAC and the next one,

and there was a significant jump in storage capacity, which has

been steady since then. For the first 35 years, storage capacity

increased about 30% a year. Those annual increases got as high as

100% between 1998 and 2002. Today, they are running around 30% to

40% a year...

The RAMAC stored 2,000 bits per square inch. In disk drives today,

the figure is as high as 135 billion bits per square inch. That's

almost a 70-million-fold increase. And in the next five years, we

will ship more disk drives than we shipped in the first 50 years...

I remember being told by Tom Steel that the machine room at the

Equitable Life Insurance company was located directly below the office

of a vice president, who was definitely not amused that his office

floor had to be taken up and a crane brought in whenever they had to

change the actual RAMAC disk. (Disk reliability has improved

enormously since then.)

My first encounter with hard disks was in 1965. The Loma Linda

University Scientific Computation Facility had an IBM 1620 Data

Processing System with two 1311 Disk Storage Drives. Each removable

1316 Disk Pack consisted of six 14-inch diameter disks, weighed 10

pounds, and could store 2 million characters (2MB, the equivalent of

25,000 punched cards). This was a revolutionary advance over storing

all the system software, application programs, and datasets on cards

and manually placing them in the card reader (or removing them from

the card punch) as needed. For me, it was much more important than the

speed and memory advantages that the 1620 had over the Bendix G-15D.

Edited on 9/14/2006 to add: Other interesting sites