Where did the icon for "database" come from?

Factual Questions
1

Doing a Google image search for “database icon” gives a lot of variations on a standard theme: vertical cylinder, sometimes split horizontally into three sub-cylinders.

A lot of computer-related icons originate as pictures of things, even if the technology is not obsolete – e.g. a 3.5" floppy disk for “disk” – but the standard database icon seems completely abstract. (I suppose it could be a representation of the internals of a hard drive, but still very stylized.) Was there ever a piece of database hardware that actually looked like that? If not, who started the “database is a cylinder” concept?

2

I had figured it was a stylistic representation of the internals of a hard disk, but I could also believe it if it were actually a representation of magnetic drum memory.

3

I always thought it was a generic representation of disk platters.

4

This is what disk packs looked like at about the time the icon was created. One of those babies could hold a couple of hundred meg!

5

And they didn’t crash too often!

6

Unless, of course, the bottom fell out of one of those disk packs as you were carrying it to the other building across the parking lot.

Happens. Oh, not to me of course! I ALWAYS held one hand on the bottom of those packs while carrying. But that day I was on vacation, my assistant didn’t.

Then there was the day another tech put one of those packs in the washing machine. (Yes, there are, or were, washing machines for disk packs.) Who knew that data was washable?

7

[QUOTE=CookingWithGas]
This is what disk packs looked like at about the time the icon was created. One of those babies could hold a couple of hundred meg!
[/QUOTE]

I’ve got a disk pack for an IBM 3330 at my desk. It weighs about 10-15 pounds with a dozen or so 14" diameter platters, and held an incredible (for the mid-70’s) 200 meg. These things were often used in eight-drive arrays that sold back then for about $80,000. The packs themselves sold for about $600 from IBM, but there were a couple of competitors that sold them for a bit less.

We really have come a long way - it would cost $800,000 back then to store 16 GB, but now, you can stick 16GB in your pocket for ten bucks and you don’t have to reinforce the floor to support the machinery. :eek:

[QUOTE=Senegoid]
Then there was the day another tech put one of those packs in the washing machine. (Yes, there are, or were, washing machines for disk packs.) Who knew that data was washable?
[/QUOTE]

How else do you scrub files? :smiley:

8

Not yet explicitly mentioned – those disk packs were for mainframe computers.

Databases were stored on direct-access devices, rather than sequential access media, such as cards or mag tape.

9

If you are interested in the hard drive business though the years, I highly recommend the book The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen. Also it you happened to watch last week’s episode of Gold Rush, something in that show will jump out at you after reading the book.

10

Not always. Our PDP-11/20 at Illinois used them. We had one washing machine sized disk drive, and each of us grad students had our own disk, which we took from a closet and inserted before we began working.

None of us ever dropped one. When I was an undergrad, however, one disk pack maker said that they’d send failed packs to anyone asking for one. My friend and mine ordered one. When it arrived we rolled it down the corridors of the MIT computer center, causing great consternation.
They told us never to do that again.