Looks about right for 1979. I have two disk drive cabinets that have become very heavy and sturdy workbenches on wheels. I threw away even more in the 80s, decommissioned hardware was all over the place. Head-per-track drives were the fastest things available because it took so much time to move the heads on large disks, and the storage density was so low they had to be large to allow a reasonable amount of data on each track.
Head-per-track drives didn’t have removable packs and some were kept in a sealed container. That picture looks like the manufacturing facility clean room, and the vertical mount may have simply been for testing and adjustment purposes before mounting the drive in a rack or cabinet.
Ah thanks, they look just like what I was thinking about. Didn’t know they were only used for RAM, not as early harddisks. Imagine how huge HDDs would be if they used this!
Many early computers got by without hard drives. IBM’s commercial customers (as opposed to scientific customers) had been using plugboard-programmable accounting machines like the 407 and were happy to keep reading input from cards and punching output on new cards - it just let them do much more advanced computations, faster.
The next step was to use tape for input and output, keeping card decks for the actual programs themselves.
Disks were seen as expensive and optional, unless you had one of a very small class of business needs that required near real-time access to data, without waiting for tapes to be loaded or cards to be read.
One of the first changes that caused disk usage to be more widespread were large (compared to punched cards or main memory) operating systems and utilities. Once you needed a disk for that, the benefits became obvious to many customers - even if disk was too expensive to store data, programs could be kept on disk, eliminating the need to load large decks of cards (with the occasional shuffle caused by dropping them) containing a program each time you wanted to run that program.
The pic labelled “Machines Don’t Lie” show both a 3330 removable disc pack (what is referred to as a Bundt cake) and a light pen - the original mouse - it was an option for the 3270 terminal, nad allowed the user to place the pen on a field and push downward on it, producing a click. It had the same effect (if the screen was programmed to recognize it) as using the cursor positioning arrows to get to a menu choice, entering a ‘x’, and pressing “Enter”.
Yeah, the computer I worked on in 1980 had 3340 and 3330 drives. The 3340’s were 280MB and the 3330’s 70MB. We had 3330’s because the IBM 370/135 would not boot off 3340’s.
Our disks were about 15 inches diameter, so that drive in the picture is either substantially bigger/fancier than 250MB, or substantially older technology.
Yes, the 3340’s looked like smoked-glass Star Trek ships, with a disk inside, a flat “back door”, and a handle. the 3330’s you pulled the “Cake-disk” cover off and/or lifted them off by a special top handle to swap them. We never actually swapped any that I recall. Someone mentioned they had a fancy vaccuum system to clean the drives when the cover was closed.
A few years before, 1978, I had bought a Commodore Pet. By 1981 IIRC you could buy a 5MB hard disk to replace/complement the cassette storage. IIRC Commodore VIC-20 was about 1981 or 1982. Hard disks for PC’s (like IBM PC or XT) started at about 10MB in about 1984 - fit in a 5-1/2 inch bay, about 4 inches high, and some would crash if you moved the computer across the desk while the disk was running.
“Ability to expand Main Memory in economical increments: B 2500, 10,000 to 60,000 bytes in increments of 10,000; B 3500, 10,000 to
500,000 bytes in an initial nine increments of 10,000 bytes plus eight
larger increments.”
I do like how they used large numbers to illustrate size… given how my 2 year old daughters five dollar Mickey Mouse “learn your shapes” doll has 10 times more memory!
I assume you mean DEC. I started with Western Electric in 1980 and hard drives were one of the few things we didn’t make ourselves. The PDP 11/20 I used in grad school was attached to a washing machine size disk drive, and each of us had our own platter we put in when we were using the machine. I don’t remember how big it was since I never ran out of space.
The big platters go way back. In 1970 one manufacturer advertised that they were so committed to quality that they would send you a defective big platter for me. A friend and I got one, and freaked out a lot of people by rolling it down the corridor of the MIT computer center.
BTW, I learned to program in high school on an LGP-21, the later transsitorized version of the LGP-30 which was being serviced by CDC. Here is an on-line copy of the programming manual, I still have mine. And I met a Harvard Business School professor who used one at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in the late 1950s.
It is depressing how much of the stuff there I’ve used. When I retire I’m going to volunteer there, since I’ve programmed the PDP-1. The MIT assembly language class was taught on the machine where Space War first ran.Our grades was determined by whether we could run The Game of Life on the big tube without it blinking.
No, actually it was a Western Electric fixed-head disk on a DEC PDP-8 computer. Well before 1980. We’d gotten it as a donation around 1975.
WeCo built a lot of oddball limited-production and 1-off stuff. We were only a few miles from the Kearny Works and we picked up, so we were very popular with their surplus equipment disposal folks.
It’s startling to realize how much the computers of the early 1960s informed the the public’s idea of what computers looked like and how they were programmed and operated. In imagining the computers of the 23rd Century, Gene Roddenberry and the writers of ST:TOS clearly extrapolated from the capabilities and appearance of machines like these.
(As if there could be a thread about old computers without Star Trek being mentioned!)
I know of 1 definite case and one probable case where a modern computer design was entirely due to the way something looked on Star Trek.
I was consulting for Sony in the late 70’s / early 80’s when I saw what would eventually become the 3.5" floppy disk. When we were given a presentation on it by the development group, they specifically called out the Star Trek library computer data modules as the inspiration for the drive format and hard shell, made in a variety of bright Trek-style colors. These were even before the “pinch to release” shutter - it was a slide you had to manually move to expose the media. These were replaced with the pinch version, which had to be shut manually but which were spring-loaded. They spent years on this, realizing that general adoption would only take place if it was completely automatic. Eventually they worked it out, and for the first year or so of production, the automatic ones had “Auto-shutter” printed on the shutter so as to not confuse people who were used to the manual versions.
I don’t have first-hand experience with the design process of the Motorola StarTAC cell phone, but I suspect it was inspired by the Star Trek communicator, both in the name and the way some early ads showed the “flick the wrist to open” Star Trek method.
Here is a fascinating teardown of a huge hard drive. This thing could survive getting hit by a bus and knocked off a cliff.
The fun begins at about 1:50.
The video says its 10 MB from around 1980. Its actually from 1989 and 1.89 GB. So, they were making huge monster hard drives well into the days of standars ATA drive sizes.
The part of the S/370 I loved was the red IPL* button
*Initial Program Load - you know it as “boot”.
There really was a large, red button of the front of the CPU Chassis (the refrigerator things with just a few lights and buttons on one end).
The 3rd shift morons were playing Frisbee with the write-protect rings for tapes when one of them hit the button - while the system was still running production.
The user’s “computers” (3270 dumb terminals) didn’t come up on time.
(they couldn’t get anyone who even understood the concept of running a computer for less than what those twits were being paid, that’s why they were still employed)
All of those buttons required a fair amount of effort to activate. I’d be very surprised if a write ring was able to activate one, even if you launched it from a crossbow at close range. Of course, the button on your system may have had a weakened spring from being pressed many times over the years. I’ve never seen one that weak myself, including on some very old systems where the engraving was worn completely off the button and much of the plastic was worn away as well.
The Emergency Pull knob also required a good amount of force to activate it. It was pull instead of push to eliminate any possibility of unintended action.