Remember 8" floppy discs?
Then 5 1/4"
then 3.5"
As the size got smaller, the memory and speed increased.

The old times
 

Yep, I have monuted and unmounted a many off those starting in 1967, and yes technology is amazing, I started working in a data center in 1967 with the Boeing company in Huntsville, Al during the Saturn days, and still at it.

My roomates were taken aback when I received a shipment of 30 CDs this weekend...yes, CDs. That would have been top of the line only what, ten years ago? 30 for $30 was a steal though....

Edit: I do still love my Rose Royce cassette in the car though

Nam your just ahead over me.
Actually started on a 1620 and 1401 in the very late 60s.

Worked with those tape drives shown, even their manual thread predecessors.
3410s ???

Had one had bad brakes, for a day or two had to very quickly slide open the door (manual) and stop the reels during rewind. Had to catch it pretty close or the tape snapped.
That was on a 370/145, had a selectric ball typewriter for a console.

My (older) brother was in the Air Force 1962 to 1968, and was trained in the state of the art at that time. He showed me a long horizontal SS(?) cylinder about 6' long that was some sort of a memory device. Anyone know ehat it might have been?

That was probably also some sort of drum memory mass storage device. Ours (we had 3) had a vertical cylinder about 20 inches diameter and 30 inches tall. Driven by about a 3 hp motor at 3600 rpm as I recall. Equally spaced around the diameter were 8 shafts that would rotate 1/4 turn. Each shaft had a gazillion heads mounted to it and when the shafts rotated, the heads were brought to the spinning cylinder. Total heads (in octal) 1777, I think. Complicated, touchy device. only 8mb storage. Very fast access though as you electronically turned on the head you wanted and just had to wait for the drum to rotate on revolution or less.
Oh, and I remember floppy disks that were about 11 inch dia. Jeeesh, I've been in this business too long.

I still remember playing that game on our old 286 when I was 5 or 6 years old with the 2 gorillas standing on skyscrapers throwing bananas at each other. You'd enter in velocity and the angle at which the banana was thrown... i remember there being variations of that program with tanks and such.

Interesting information about hard drives, back in the late 70s my boss went to the NY IBM R&D center. He came back with a book; I wish I’d have saved it.

The heads are flying; the spinning platters create a cushion of air that lifts the heads. That’s why when there is a power fail you can have a drive crash as that cushion disappears.
The book showed the gap the heads fly over the platter, a molecule of smoke was roughly twice the size of that gap.
It equated the heads flying to roughly the equivalent of flying a 747 at the speed of sound 18 inches off the ground.

The first HDs I worked with, the heads were actually hydraulically actuated, had one time my boss started pound on the window to the computer room. There was a tiny stream of oil spraying out of the drive onto the window.

The new Winchester drives are magnetically operated, using what basically is a speaker coil. The book explained that there really are only two speeds, full forward and full stop.
Something like driving from stop light to stop light where you stomp the gas, and stomp the break and always stop right on the line.

In the late 90s I worked with a company that produces diamond polishing compounds, mostly for very high tech applications. Although including the auto industry to hone cylinders (brake and engine).
The interesting point was in their specialty inventory section, each grit was color coded, until you got to the last 2 shelf’s, which had very small containers and plain.
The molecule of the color was smaller then the diamond molecule for polishing.
They were/are big supplies to the drive manufacturers, mostly for polishing the heads.
And the owner commented if you took cigarette ash, ground it with your fingers as fine as you could, it would barely make it to the top 3 shelves (there were 8 or 10 as I recall) as far as grit level.


Storage technolgy still fasinates me, having spent much of my IT career as a DBA or something similiar.

I remember my dad complaining about eternal september.


Remember when cars used to run on this stinky stuff they pumped out of the ground?! God and to think people fought over it.

I'm glad I first learned to program computers back when a massive amount of memory was 64k. It taught me to be effiecient and innovative in my algorithms. Most of today's young programmers are used to a massive amount of resources available, so they write sloppy code.

Only if the target device is a PC.

Handheld developers (where the industry is heading) are having to consider how to code for a device with limited storage and memory footprint, as well as issues with battery life, sleep mode, etc...

Oh man this brings back memories!

I have worked on systems ranging from Burroughs (remember THEM?) which BOOTED from cassette tape, IBM 370 systems - 32 9 track tape drives, four 3380 disk arrays, two card readers, one card punch and two printers. This machine had 32k online RAM! We did things like USPS address database merge/purge jobs - they would run for hours! The cool thing was the two buttons on the console [STOP] and [START] if we wanted to take a break, we would hit [STOP] and the system would. when we got back just hit [START] and it would resume...

I moved from there to things like AT&T 3B's, DEC P19(I think) and then back to IBM for their SYSTEM-36/38 'Mini' computers.

Anybody remember 3278 terminals? 3174 Cluster Controllers? How about 7171 FEPs?

Amazing how far we have come - Now my Palm Pre has more computing power than my first mainframe and the laptop I just retired!

I also lol at processing power and memory, and I grew up when the fight was "Apple vs IBM" or "256k or 640k of memory?".
What gets me most is.....if we have all these new capabilities literally at our fingertips....what exactly are we doing with it ? (surfing facebook, reading to Paris Hilton's Tweets, pocket-dialling Flava Flav.... =)

(remind me to grab a rust-free 240D next time I see one =)

-John

Mostly were learning how to kill each other more efficiently.

Before the PC revolution, I wrote critical path scheduling program for housing construction, and tracked 20+ houses a week all on a C-64. IIRC, I had about 30 bytes of free memory available. The program ran overnight--almost ALL overnight.