5 MB hard drive in 1956
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This honestly just makes me wonder how chill a workday was if three whole buildings of office drones could empty into the streets to watch them load this for two hours.
My brother in christ, you have no idea. The rise of the computer age and needing round the clock support for all that entails has really done a number on the working class. I am old enough to remember how chill work environments in the 80's and early 90's were. (Everyone smoking indoors sucked, though)
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Hey if someone told me I could go see the 2025 equivalent of this hard drive being unloaded if probably go take a look.
What would that even be?
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Hey if someone told me I could go see the 2025 equivalent of this hard drive being unloaded if probably go take a look.
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My brother in christ, you have no idea. The rise of the computer age and needing round the clock support for all that entails has really done a number on the working class. I am old enough to remember how chill work environments in the 80's and early 90's were. (Everyone smoking indoors sucked, though)
I considered editing my comment to reference the rampant secondhand smoke.
But yeah I just interviewed for a position with an on-call rotation. I asked them about sleeping hours, and then I asked them about attendance expectations in the face of a midnight emergency. They just blinked at me.
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But of trivia about the first IBM hard drive: the heads weighed about 8g each and were glued to the actuator arms. The platters needed periodic cleaning, but the cleaning agent dissolved the glue holding the heads. The heads would break free from the arms and adhere to the platter. The rotation speed would accelerate the head outward, and the head would exit the housing with the approximate kinetic energy of a 9mm bullet.
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Printed circuit boards were becoming "commonplace" (according to Wikipedia), the transistor had been invented about 7 years before, and the hard drive was about to be invented in two years (without time-traveler help), so they'd probably be able to figure out at least conceptually what they were looking at. In other words, it's not as if it would seem like a magical rock etched with runes or something, like it would if you showed it to somebody from 1554.
Therefore, I think they'd get out a microscope and oscilloscope and start trying to reverse-engineer it. Probably speed up the development of computer technology quite a bit, by giving them clues on what direction to go.
Therefore, I think they'd get out a microscope and oscilloscope and start trying to reverse-engineer it. Probably speed up the development of computer technology quite a bit, by giving them clues on what direction to go.
Knowing what something is doesn't necessarily teach people how it was made. No matter how much you examine a sheet of printed paper, someone with no conception of a laser printer would not be able to derive that much information about how something could have produced such precise, sharp text on a page. They'd be stuck thinking about movable metal type dipped in ink, not lasers burning powdered toner onto a page.
If you took a modern finFET chip from, say, the TSMC 5nm process nodes, and gave it to electrical engineers of 1995, they'd be really impressed with the physical three dimensional structure of the transistors. They could probably envision how computers make it possible to design those chips. But they'd had no conception of how to make EUV at wavelengths necessary to make the photolithography possible at those sizes. No amount of the examination of the chip itself will reveal the secrets of how it was made: very bright lasers pointed at an impossibly precise stream of liquid tin droplets against highly polished mirrors that focus that EUV radiation against the silicon and masks that make the 2-dimensional planar pattern, then advanced techniques for lining up 2-dimensional features into a three dimensional stack.
It's kinda like how we don't actually know how Roman concrete or Damascus steel was made. We can actually make better concrete and steel today, but we haven't been able to reverse engineer how they made those materials in ancient times.
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Look at that back form, my gosh.
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What would that even be?
Server rack with a couple of PBs worth of drives in it would probably match the physical size. Or a massive tape archive storage.
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I considered editing my comment to reference the rampant secondhand smoke.
But yeah I just interviewed for a position with an on-call rotation. I asked them about sleeping hours, and then I asked them about attendance expectations in the face of a midnight emergency. They just blinked at me.
Good luck to you man. I went through that for a long time but those days are behind me now.
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Yes kids, before color TV was commonplace people would stand around and watch cargo get loaded for fun. It was a dark time in entertainment history.
Tbh they could be waiting for the path to clear so they could get past
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My brother in christ, you have no idea. The rise of the computer age and needing round the clock support for all that entails has really done a number on the working class. I am old enough to remember how chill work environments in the 80's and early 90's were. (Everyone smoking indoors sucked, though)
The invention of clocks ruined the workday as well.
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Cute how the IBM logo basically hasn't changed
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Only recently! For the past 10,000 years a 70-year span would not see a single significant change.
(If I mix this up, someone correct me.)
I think it was at Olduvai, or somewhere in the Great Rift Valley, that hominids spent 600,000 years hammering out the same exact stone tools.
that's why i put "technology" in quotation marks.
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Do you weigh more than a duck with an anvil?
Guess that depends on the anvil
https://www.anvilfire.com/anvils/af_anvils-largest.php -
What would have happened if we just dropped a 20tb hard drive in front of the computer researchers of that time?
Nothing, they would have no idea what it was, or how to interface with it. They might even end up destroying it because they have no idea of the power requirements. Even if they managed to get it powered up and guessed at what it was for, they would still be stuck with the issue of not having an operating system which is capable of logically addressing all of the storage. And the lack of drivers would make that even harder.
A lot of modern technology sits atop a mountain of other modern technology which must be sorted out before you can even start to think about designing the end product. It could be that, since they knew what was possible, and had an example to crib off of, scientists and engineers could have gotten to that point faster. But, there is just an insane amount of prior tech in front of modern computers that any one piece of it, thrown back that far, would likely just be shiny junk.
One of my favorite things about what you are saying is modern transistor gates are smaller than microscope resolution at the time. Even if they could recognize an integrated circuit it would be another 10-20 years before they could even start to reverse engineer it.
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As you can see from the sign, hard drive parking had not yet been invented.
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Even in the 80s when I was a fresh-faced young programmer the hard drives we had in the computer room were the size of washing machines. I don't remember how much data they held, but the disk packs they held were stacks of disks more than a foot wide, spaced apart for the heads to reach in. The disk packs had clear plastic covers, like big cakes. You would lower one into the drive, twist the handle to lock it in, pull out the cover and close the lid, just like on a washing machine.
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Cute how the IBM logo basically hasn't changed
Fun fact: it used to have 13 bars, but changed to the current 8 because 13 bars could not be made pretty on (8-pin) matrix printers.
Fun fact: exactly once, the team organising IBM's participation in the Copenhagen Pride parade got away with wearing t-shirts with the bars printed in the rainbow colours. Immediately after, they were notified that such alterations to corporate branding was unacceptable.
^(I cherry the two shirts I still have.) -
Crazy how quickly technology can progress.
70 years is a long loooooooooooooooooong time for "technology"
I mean, yeah, that's what he was getting at. How 70 years seems like a long time in the context of modern technology despite being very short in the sense of human history.
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Crazy how quickly technology can progress.
70 years is a long loooooooooooooooooong time for "technology"
It is nowadays, and it is in RF and digital electronics, but that's far from universal.
