Harddisk You Might Have Never Seen

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

I remember I saw a show on the history of personal computing once where they showed a bunch of those, some even larger then those (but I forget where they were from... I'm sure googling you could find more). All the early generation HD's were ginormous though, I mean they were small comapred to having computers made of tubes that took up a huge room... but still... glad they improved the tech a 'bit'

[Quatrux 4]

well, Computers weren't so big in the 1980-1985, for example zx spectrum or commodore, but they were for home market and hard drives like that - I don't know if they were used by home users, they really were very expensive, even the ordinary 20-60MB HDDs were really expensive to have.. (much more expensive than the whole computer) Furthermore, the reading and writing speed was really slow and the sound made by it was also not silent.. I had a 40 MB HDD in my Amiga 500, and also had an 400 MB HDD for Amiga 500+ but I was still using floppy disks, those were the days, file systems weren't so good as they are now and they were slow and usually messed up when electricity disappeared and appeared.Maybe those kind of storage were needed for NASA, which needed to store lots of graphics and information and etc. Games at those times did not take more than 1-2 floppy disks, if not counting the simulators on Silicon Graphics computers usually for the Army. A lot of whom used ROM to store information which you cannot delete or write, it was faster, or cartridges appeared to be useful too.

[Jeigh1405241495 0]

I remember the days of piles of floppies to store my games, *sniff* ah the golden days

[abhiram 0]

Are you sure these aren't motorcycle engines?

Motorcycle engines? Those things are even bigger than the water pump we use at home. Geez ... just look at the size of those things. How the heck is anyone supposed to connect them to the system? If you've got to move your computer somewhere else, it'll cause a hell of a problem.

[wutske 0]

wow, that gemmy is niiiiice. It even has it's own psu . And 2,2Gb, that thing must have cost a fortune back then Other ones are nice too, if could get one of those for few money, I would definately get it

[iGuest 3]

woah, were those like the first invented hard drives? it looks like a chainsaw lol, but really if that big thing is the fan...then wow, thats crazy cause people use things that size now adays as like heatsinks or something better with their hardware..crazy, nice find though

[darkken 0]

Pretty high capacity for the time. 2.2gb in 1983 is like 2.2 tb now

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

That's a pretty big hard drive. It must have been built for mainframes back in the 1970s/1980s when mainframes were still around before clusters replaced them.xboxrulz

[Atomic0 0]

Such ancient technology. It reflects how technology has evolved over time at an ever-increasing rate. We may see in the future hard disks being replaced from flash solid state drivers that have no mechanical parts at all.

[docduke 0]

The first computer I ever worked on was an IBM 650 in 1958. (I don't remember the girls being that pretty, then ) The drum was something like 18 inches in diameter, and 2-2.5 feet long. Wikipedia reminds me that it had 2,000 signed 10-digit words of memory. All programming was done in Assembly language. I remember we considered it very advanced, because we didn't have to manually assign numeric addresses for variable locations.

Even then, the CPU was much faster than the drum. The drum was so slow that the Assembly language was called SOAP, Symbolic Optimizing Assembly Program, and it actually worked out where to store the data and executable instructions on the drum so that the next instruction and data would be underneath the read head "just in time" for the CPU to use them. Today, that kind of problem is solved with caches.

[LegallyHigh 0]

Haha, those don't even look like Hard drives, its weird to think they were that big not too long ago. Those thngs look big enough to pass as small motors (like for a weed wacker or something). However, I'm glad that today the size of computer compenents has decreased because it looks like those things would have a good some weight to them, they would be very unpractical, especially if they hgad tried to make a laptop from them. Other than that though, they look kind of nice, just very unefficient compared to the hard drives of today.

[LegallyHigh 0]

Haha, those don't even look like Hard drives, its weird to think they were that big not too long ago. Those thngs look big enough to pass as small motors (like for a weed wacker or something). However, I'm glad that today the size of computer compenents has decreased because it looks like those things would have a good some weight to them, they would be very unpractical, especially if they hgad tried to make a laptop from them. Other than that though, they look kind of nice, just very unefficient compared to the hard drives of today.