My music storage NAS space is equal to more than 2,000,000 of these units.

Imagine the power consumption, heat and related cooling hassle, and the footprint of two million of these boxes, just to store your record collection. A few Mall of Americas worth of giant hard drives, or more. Two million of them, connected, is hard to comprehend.

Now it fits in a shoe box sized case and cost a few bucks a month to run and is something I've had now for about a decade of the 60-ish years that have passed. In just 50yrs all that happened. It's astonishing. Like my two year old 64GB thumb drive that was $60 then.

quote:

Originally posted by LimaCharlie:
My first computer was a Univac with vacuum tubes. It was classified top-secret and I couldn't tell anyone where I worked or what I did.

I worked at Control Data Corp. In the 60's. CDC developed the first transistor-logic large scientific computer, the CDC 1604. The CDC founders came from Univac, where they had developed the vacuum tube logic Univac 1103. The nascent CDC Corp. rented space in a warehouse located at 501 Park Ave. in Minneapolis. So they named their new computer the CDC 1604 because:

1103 + 501 = 1604

Just ten minutes ago I was marveling at thumb drives. I haven't looked in a while but $25 can get you a 128GB drive. You could probably fit 2 dozen in your pocket.

Wow!

The phone that I'm viewing this picture on has around 10,000 times that capacity.

quote:

Originally posted by Pipe Smoker:

quote:

Originally posted by JALLEN:
<snip>I don't know if that included the special black box to interface between 8 bit bytes and 36 bit words.

Or maybe 6-bit bytes, plus a parity bit…

The 9000 used 8 bit bytes. The NTDS boxes we used then had 36 bit words. This box translated.

Interesting that you talked about Control Data. I worked at the UT computer center which had a 6600, one of only a few in the world then.

Looking at all this "history", I wonder what the price/performance of computers will be in 50 years?

Way back when, when I was working in Field Engineering for IBM, I ran across a number of these things. AIR, the disk pack was about 18 inched wide, 8 inches high and had 10 disks in it. Each disk was double sided giving 20 working sides. 19 of those surfaces were for data, the 20th contained all the data necessary to "manage" the pack.

I remember, not too fondly, all the crap that was created when 1 of the read/write heads actually touched the disk surface.

No hilarity ensued!!!!!!!!!!!!

We spent literally hours and hours cleaning up all the oxide and aluminum shavings that had bee sucked through the entire drive itself.

Not to mention replacing all 20 R/W heads and re-aligning them on a master pack that only we CEs had. One such "crash" often took up to 2 days to clean up.

quote:

Originally posted by Sir Guy:
Really makes you think where we'll be in another 60 years. Thanks for the photo.

...

Worked on IBM 305 RAMAC (350 is disk drive) in 1960 in USAF. Had the optional 2nd movable head for faster access. Moved on to IBM 1401 in 1961, Univac 1050 (drum storage) in 1967, Burroughs 3500 in 1968, before leaving USAF in 1970 for Burroughs Corp, Pasadena CA to work in compiler support. Started out with punch card stuff in 1959 - IBM sorter, punch, 407 accounting machine, 602A calculating machine, collator. Lots of fun. Spent many a night moving large volumes of cards around. Wired a lot of control panels, too.

quote:

Originally posted by 46and2:
Saw this elsewhere and though it was cool.

It's said to be a model "350 Ramac", with a 5000 character (or about 3.75MB) capacity.

I'm having trouble wrapping my head around the math. A MB or megabyte is 1,048,576 bytes. Typically when folks are talking about MB, they are talking about eight bit bytes, which generally each hold one ASCII character. I'd think that a 3.75MB drive would hold 3.75 * 1,048,576 characters less whatever was eaten up in formatting. Certainly formatting, FAT tables etc will eat up some space, but I'd expect closer to 3,932,160 characters than 5,000 characters. Maybe they meant 5,000 pages of text?

Whoops, missed Wino's post. Much more believable.

quote:

Originally posted by Wino:
"The first IBM drive, the 350 RAMAC, was approximately the size of two refrigerators and stored 5 million 6-bit characters (the equivalent of 3.75 million 8-bit bytes) on a stack of 50 discs."

https://www.ibm.com/developerw...t_on_storage?lang=en

Of course if one is talking octal pages with 777 36 bit words on them, that is a whole different animal, but that was on DEC-SYSTEM 20s. I didn't fool with IBM mainframes, so I don't know how they organized their storage.

quote:

Pretty cool...

Very cool. Kinda like the pallet of core memory sitting on the loading dock at LOTS when I was at school. Ancient and totally obsolete, but very cool.

Elk - Had the same experience. A 500MB disc was about that size. LMAO at how things progressed. If only our kids knew what we know about old computers!

In mountain view CA quite close to the Google HQ is the computer museum of Silicon Valley. Explained to my 9 year old son about how his grandpa used punchcards to enter data and how his dad (me ) used tape cassettes in the early 80s and then 5 inch floppys to play promitive games on a 1 color(green) Apple II. And he thinks out MacBook Pro is slow...

What was MSRP on that IBM drive ? 10s of thousands?$$. Only big companies could probly afford that. And that 3TB drive ? I can get one at Costco for what $100? Over there next to a case of TP and. $1.50 hotdog and soda

By the time my 9 year old graduates High school in 9 years. That's a 10TB drive and it's gonna cost 29.95. The iPhone 15 he will get for college graduation will be 100 times as powerful as the i6 I type this on. Check out Moores law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

Well I must be a little younger than some, born in the early 80s. Nonetheless, I was still amazed when I heard the original Super Mario Brothers was only 32 Kilobytes. That just seems crazy to me given songs are 2-5 MB, even the pictures my Canon takes are 8-10 MB each.

quote:

Originally posted by hunter62:
Well I must be a little younger than some, born in the early 80s. Nonetheless, I was still amazed when I heard the original Super Mario Brothers was only 32 Kilobytes. That just seems crazy to me given songs are 2-5 MB, even the pictures my Canon takes are 8-10 MB each.

Back in the old days, memory was tight and processors were slow. People wrote really tight code because they had to. Now memory is cheap and plentiful and processors are fast and getting faster. The bloat is horrifying. Lots of neat features show up too though, so we take the bitter with the sweet.

That thing wouldn't store more than a couple photos on your typical smart-phone. Times change.

Years ago at U of Oregon, I took my punch cards to a building with a 350 or 360 something computer inside. Next day I got that greenish multi-fold paper back hoping it did not have a "you dummy" on it.

I just have to say, when you old farts start talking about computers with transistors and tube and punch cards, I'm truly in awe of your knowledge and experience. I wish I knew even enough to follow the conversation. These threads always intrigue me.

quote:

Originally posted by slosig:
Back in the old days, memory was tight and processors were slow. People wrote really tight code because they had to. Now memory is cheap and plentiful and processors are fast and getting faster. The bloat is horrifying. Lots of neat features show up too though, so we take the bitter with the sweet.

Some of us still write really tight code. Makes a big difference when it has to.

Now you can walk around with a phone in your pocket with 256gb on board; same with a flash drive, even smaller than its namesake, the thumb drive.