I came across this on ComputerWorld this morning - an interesting article called
"Computer History Museum to highlight storage, from RAMAC to microdrives."
Having joined IBM as a hardware engineer in 1980, I saw these developments first-hand and was intrinsically involved in the development and deployment of newer hard drive systems with IBM. I started off being trained on IBM's 3340, the first of the "Winchester" disk subsystems - with combined platter capacities of about 280Mb per removable pack. The 8-inch floppy had just been introduced.
What a ride. I love the fact that I was there to see it all.
For those of you interested...enjoy!
The complete article, which is really worth the read is here:
http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic...to_microdrives
Quote:
Computer History Museum to highlight storage, from RAMAC to microdrives. Today's $60 1TB drive would have cost $1 trillion in the '50s
By Lucas Mearian
December 29, 2010 06:04 AM ETComments (0)Recommended (12)
Computerworld - Hard disk drives sure have come a long way, baby.
In the 1950s, storage hardware was measured in feet -- and in tons. Back then, the era's state-of-the-art computer drive was found in IBM's RAMAC 305; it consisted of two refrigerator-size boxes that weighed about a ton each. One box held 40 24-inch dual-sided magnetic disk platters; a carriage with two recording heads suspended by compressed air moved up and down the stack to access the disks. The other cabinet contained the data processing unit, the magnetic process drum, magnetic core register and electronic logical and arithmetic circuits.
Today, we have flash drives, microdrives, and onboard solid-state drives that weigh almost nothing, hold gigabytes of data and cost -- compared to the 1950s -- very little. How cheap is storage now? A 1TB hard drive that sells for as little as $60 today would have been worth $1 trillion in the 1950s, when computer storage cost $1 per byte, according to Dag Spicer, senior curator of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif.
And a modern-day 4GB stick of RAM would have cost $32 billion.
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