What 200MB looked like in 1970 | Hacker News Reader

What 200MB looked like in 1970

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16 pointssinzone14 comments

That would be a "Winchester" drive. I remember for some time, the "stack of disks" icon was used in diagram as a shorthand for "hard drive" or "permanent storage". Not sure if that's still in use.

Interesting example of how technology changes its external shape -- usually into some nondescript boxy thing, but the old designs live on as iconography. Like diskette icon as a shorthand for "Save". Or this one still going strong in Latin America:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Road_Sign_Peru_Prohib...

"No horn blowing" -- that would be the horn of a Ford T on that sign...

In my first job, I was almost killed when the lock that holds ones of these to the spindle failed and the disk flew off the spindle and embedded itself in the wall behind the chair I had been sitting in 5 minutes before.

This was around 1987, but we were rather poor in Ireland so government offices depended on technology that was about 5-10 years out of date. My duties including checking the monthly mainframe time-sharing 'bills' with a calculator and knowing which punched fabric ribbon to hand on a printer control spindle to ensure that an incoming data dump would be correctly formatted. At the time I hated working with such antique technology but with hindsight it paid off by giving me a lower-level understanding of computers than I might have had if I had begun my career working with MS-DOS 3 on 286s, which were state of the art at the time IIRC.

It doesn't show anything to compare it to in size. Useless.

For a rough-order-of-magnitude, picture your stretched out hand as roughly the size of the inner ring.

It's about 18" in diameter.

I used to use one as a doorstop for my office, in its translucent plastic carrier.

Lucky guy... All I have is a tape reel I place between my books.

I say it's my FORTRAN compiler.

Just one small little nit: Dysan wasn't founded until 1973.

Given the same volume what is that now 20tb?

I think a way more of 20TB

Yeah. If you have 1TB HDDs, that looks about 6 or 7 HDDs high, and the area of the top, if rectangularized, looks like about 8 HDDs. So that's ~50TB by a very rough estimate.

And I think you can actually buy either 1.5 or 2TB now, so that would make it ~100TB.

100 terabytes = 104 857 600 megabytes, which is a factor of 524 288

I don't understand, can you explain? (Sorry!)

He's just saying that 100 TB = 100 * 2^20 MB = 104 857 600 MB. Since the original storage device (the link posted) was 200MB in the same volume, that means we've improved by a factor of (104 857 600 MB)/(200 MB) = 524 288. So hard drives are now ~524288x denser storage devices than that spool.

Not to mention that it would be probably considerably cheaper than this device used to cost back then. (I have no data to back up my claims, it's just a wild guess.)

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