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September 14, 2006
Hard disks, and the forum news machine
Phew. It's getting hard to keep up with the news and tips that the Bleeding Edge community is contributing to the forum. Behind the face of this very ordinary tech blog, there's an incredible news machine. Stephen's a fount of information and helpful hints on Vista and Microsoft's Live offerings, for instance; Bazcaz has some handy hints on Windows Run commands; Dave's chimed in with some software that helps you keep track of library loans [just yesterday, gulp, we handed over $23 in fines to the City Library, so this could be EXTREMELY helpful); and Anandasim has just posted a link to a story of the 50th anniversary of the hard disk.
Bleeding Edge can remember paying a small fortune for our first 20MB - that's megabytes, not gigabytes - hard disk, back when the IBM PC first came on the market, and they used to be called Winchester hard disks.
We fondly imagined, way back then, that we'd never, ever be able to fill it. We couldn't dream of such huge amounts of data, back in those days. Now we've got a 1GB USB key that cost (this is a wild calculation), less than a fifth of what we paid for the 20MB drive. By comparison, it's blindingly fast, infinitely more robust. And we can fill it with one or two (video) files. That's progress.
Anyone got any good hard disk stories? We're feeling nostalgic.
Posted by cw at September 14, 2006 05:43 PM
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Comments
Funny Charles, I was just rubbing a finger over the that family pizza sized hard disk platter someone gave me from a Uni computer centre. This, while I was waiting for a sick virtual hard disk in a Virtual PC to come good.
I remember the crude looking ST405 hard disks and then the early Western Digital IDE hard disks - you had to literally give the bearing a finger to help it spin up after a holiday. Or the time I messed with some software that wiped out the MFT data structure of my hard disk before I had calculated my invoices.
Posted by: anandasim ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://bleedingedge.com.au/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at September 14, 2006 06:22 PM
2GB, you will never fill it said the salesman. It did become borderline but all problems were solved with our next machine, 6GB. 80GB has done ok for quite a while.
Posted by: Andrew at September 14, 2006 10:08 PM
I can remember a dying 40M ST? harddisk in a 286 or 386 machine running a strange cobol-based system called BOS.
The disk had spun for so long that the spindle wore an oval-shaped groove in the bearings, and if we switched it off it would jam and not spin up when it came back on... judicious pressure with fingernails and a bit of luck managed to get it going that one last time to migrate the data onto a shiny new identical 40M drive.
Posted by: ajft at September 15, 2006 02:34 PM
Young whippersnappers. 20MB? IBM PCs?
Several hundred dollars to import a *massive* five (5) MB
external HD for an Apple II. (Ah. 140K 5 1/4" floppies.)
A few years on it was running via a hand soldered controller
(and custom driver s/w) on an Amiga 1000.
Now my 20GB iPod is almost full, and it's all music.
Posted by: Blogless Clive at September 18, 2006 12:34 PM