Thread: Old Hard Drive Technology Lives on

I know what you mean Garry!
About 3 years ago we had an old Full height HDD (about 3-4 inches high) which was around 40Mb, we unscrewed the cover and put on a bit of perspex and put our website on it, it was great to watch the heads moving around when we got a "hit".
I imagine a modern HDD would last seconds till microscopic dust would destroy it.

Fraser

MTBF is one of the bigger things that changed in many cases.

in the old days they were made for 100000 hours now the cheaper gear is under 10000 hours

my first hard drive for my atari 800 was a 10mb drive that cost $1600 and the sasi / scsi controller cost me $400.

ran a multiline BBS of it .. the things you used to be able to do with 64k of ram and 4 floppy drives

Australian Gas Light Coy. in Sydney had the first private sector computer in Australia, 1955. It took up two floors of a city building, had its own electricity sub-station to feed power, an engineering staff to maintain it, and less capacity than a modern laptop.

Its building was air-conditioned to keep the computer cool, not for the comfort of the staff. The only air-conditioned building in AGL's empire.

In about 1975 when I was working for BHP, we had recently got the first computer for out department, a Data General, can't remember which model. It lived in a "clean" room, but the thing I remember was that a few months after getting it, it became apparent that we needed more memory. So we put up a case for an additional 128k of memory bringing total memory to 256k. I don't remember the actual cost of it, but I do remember that the proposal was so large it had to go to the BHP Board for approval.

John

We won't mention the cost of our first power mac... was a brilliant deal on a show special with a massive 17" monitor all for the cool sum of 28k

OK here we go .
In 1975 I started in Ford Australia head Office as Options Manager.
One of my jobs was to be the user representative for the debugging and commissioning of a new production status program.
The machine in Broadmeadows was a Boroughs 4700 with AFAIK about 256K.
It filled a room about 5x8 metres and there were 22 data entry operators producing punch tape, and AFAIR about 8 mercury column reel to reel tape decks which stood about 1.5 metres tall.

The programmer and I used to go in on weekends and start her up and run the new programs off line to try and find any loops etc. It was spooky in there as he started her up and the giant stirred.
In Brisbane Plant I recall when I had to sort the cards , I had an IBM sorter which was about 2 metres long and sorted by binary groups.
I did COBOL waaaay back in Queensland Uni in about 1970, so don't you young whippersnappers criticise we old codgers.
Regards Philip A

Three Yorkshiremen continued

Brilliant!

However this is today's news.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/st...014239,00.html

I remember in 99 when I got my first Laptop. 5.5GB HDD 64MB RAM 8MB graphics card. It was one of the first laptops with a 800x600 resolution.

My how times have change.