golden age hard drive

[MrBern]

Today the Hard drive turns 50.
Almost golden age!


http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20060913/tc_pcworld/127104

In1956, the first hard drive was 2 refrigerators wide & stored the equivalent of one mp3 song....

 

[Marc Chevalier]

In1956, the first hard drive was 2 refrigerators wide & stored the equivalent of one mp3 song....

Yeah, but which song?

.

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

That's one item that I'm really glad they figured out how to downsize.
My PC alone would probably have to be as big as a medium sized sky scraper. My "refrigerator" contains over 250 MP3's! :eusa_doh:

 

[McPeppers]

Wickersham notes that the advancement is startling when compared to the pace of other industries: "In the auto industry, to keep that same pace, they'd have gone from fitting five people in the car in 1956, to fitting 160,000 people in that car; or, from getting 25 miles per gallon to 62,500 miles per gallon."

Please god... make the second happen... not the first... the second...

 

[Maj.Nick Danger]

Could you imagine that?

You could run every car you ever owned on a single tank of gas!
Maybe even trade a car in with gas to spare.

 

[McPeppers]

Single tank??? lol I've had my car a year now... wouldnt have dented a ONE gallon tank lol

 

[Haversack]

The US Army Field Artillery was using a computer with a hard drive of nearly that size and vintage up into the 1980s. Called the Field Artillery Digital Automatic Computer, (or Freddy FADAC) by those in the Fire Direction Center, this thing was the size of a steamer trunk and would spin up sounding like a turbo-jet. It could take data on a paper tape and the display was made of small, incandescent tubes called "Nixie Lights" In spite of its 1950s sophistication, a good FDC team could usually beat Freddy for a first firing solution using "charts and darts" (map, pins, protractor, and slide-rule) - A method CPT Harry Truman would be familiar with. Then some bright LT figured out he could program a TI-59 calculator to do the same works and things started changing FAST.

Haversack.