Marty Ennis sent this a picture of an IBM Hard Disk Drive (HDD) in 1956. It weighed one ton and stored 5 MB of data. It was introduced with the 305 RAMAC computer, the first computer with a HDD.
And in case you're wondering what "PAA" signifies, it is 'Pan American World Airways', for many years (from the 1930s till 1991) the USA's principal international airline, now confined to the electronic dustbin of history.
"User, n. The word computer professionals use when they mean 'idiot'." -- Dave Barry
Michael,
The first Disk Drive I worked on was the size of a washing machine and weighed about 200 lbs. Head Calibration required 'feeler gauges' and diagnostic programs were written in machine code - usually entered by hand via the control panel.
Working on computer systems of the era was quite challenging by today's standards. Integrated Circuits were 'primitive' and unreliable. We have gone a long way since those days. A good read on computers of this era is at http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2009/01/22/how-the-computer-gets-the-answer/
dw
Posted by: dw | Friday, 23 January 2009 at 05:41 PM