10mb hard drive from the 1960's

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Thin_Dream2079@reddit

Oldest I ever got to touch was an OS/360 emulator machine IBM brought in for testing legacy DB/2 systems, early 2000s. Only the consultant could operate the “SPUFI” user interface to get it configured right.

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Difficult-Novel-8453@reddit

I saw a HD pulled from an old nuclear reactor. Huge!!!!They said it took a crazy amount of modern computers to replace the old custom build system with a fraction of the power and it never worked as well but parts were NA for the old one so they had no choice but to replace it.

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brennydenny@reddit

This picture would take up most of the space on that hard drive

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No_Highlight_3857@reddit

10 millibits

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More_Access_2624@reddit

Got a couple of removable multiplatter hard drives from a Digital Decsystem 20 RP06 drive. Its capacity was 176 megabytes which was considerably large in the early 80s. Bought two at a university auction that I used to work at. I’ve done SPSS statistics on them back then. Yes yes I’m old but have witnessed using analog computers to coding Nvida GPUs today. What a trip!

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Narrow_Device_3758@reddit

I worked with IBM 2314: A set of 8 disks had 233 MB. Access time: 60 millisec.

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mwehle@reddit

Multiplatter disk packs was my immediate thought when I saw this. Used to operate IBM big iron - 370, 4341, in early 1980s, PDP hardware mid-1980s. It was all multiplatter.

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More_Access_2624@reddit

Have fond memories of PDPs, used one when in college early 80s as part of a course. Had to enter short bootstrap code via the flippers to boot off the hard drive.

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Practical-Hand203@reddit

Wow, SPSS has been around for a long time, TIL

Initial release 1968; 57 years ago

Version 31 was released June this year.

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More_Access_2624@reddit

SPSS was on the Decsystem 20 in 1980, that’s when I graduated high school and started working at the university using Fortran and SPSS for medical research labs. I recall SPSS was available in late 70s for that system.

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More_Access_2624@reddit

It was version 6.9. FYI the Decsystem 20 was a 36 bit system which was common at the time for mainframes before 32 & 64 bit computers became the norm.

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Big_Cryptographer_16@reddit

Wow getting nostalgic in here as expected with this post. Had to support OpenVMS on DEC and Tandem Alphas in the late 90s into early 2000s. Healthcare vertical was still using them heavily.

And my company is still running mission critical apps on AS/400 and those ancient skills still come in handy.

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More_Access_2624@reddit

Read that the Decsystem 20 powered the Compuserve online service! Used it for a while till AOL came around.

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Voltabueno@reddit

Looks a little bit like David Koehler.

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iocan28@reddit

He looks like my electric motors teacher from MSU.

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KlausBertKlausewitz@reddit

😳

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Phydoux@reddit

The read/write heads were probably bigger than my thumb.

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No_Vegetable_6645@reddit

What the fu- good grief it's fucking large

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canthearu_ack@reddit

Don't drop it on your foot!

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NashEast65@reddit

“Do you have 10mb hard drives?”

“Yes I do.”

“Then how did you get to the phone so fast?”

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MonsieurMoune@reddit

Unless its a Bigfoot :o

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DeepDayze@reddit

Lol I dropped a Bigfoot 5.25" drive on my foot once...yeowch!

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UrUrinousAnus@reddit

I dropped a Dell Bigfoot keyboard on my balls once, but yours sounds worse. Old HDDs were heavy. Just a box of iron, really.

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DeepDayze@reddit

Oh yeah those old hdd's were HEAVY no doubt!

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digitalrampage@reddit

No way that platter held 10mb in the 60s. Maybe it held 2-4mb

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Nafinchin@reddit

I have one of these sitting in my closet, and have absolutely no idea where it even came from.

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SuspiciousStable9649@reddit

My mom had a large shoebox 100 mb hard drive that she used for a couple decades.

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Scrooloose_original@reddit

And then the transformers showed us how to make things small lol

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Markgregory555@reddit

Now this is something you don’t see every day. 👍

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MakerKevJ@reddit

our science teacher had a few of these hanging on the wall in his classroom when I was in high school.

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ol-gormsby@reddit

You could probably put that under a microscope and identify the bits. Magnetic particle zeroes were – and ones were |

/jk, just in case.........

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norty-dc@reddit

Oh but there were and are magnetic media viewers!

Little bits of iron oxide in oil in a glass container, aligned themselves with the magnetic domains on the media. Check "magnetic tape viewer" in google...

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Beginning_Quail_5172@reddit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZOxn8ggX8w

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RevolutionarySeven7@reddit

a vinyl could potentially store 2.3mb in bits ! so yes, you could see the bits under a microscope

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mikee8989@reddit

I think you can see the 1s and zeros with a magnifying glass.

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Beginning_Quail_5172@reddit

Or a Magnetic Tape Viewer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZOxn8ggX8w

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MakerWerks@reddit

I remember the first time my boss told me we needed to replace a hard drive in an IBM System 34, and to do that, I'd have to literally crawl inside the machine.

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istarian@reddit

I wonder how much data you could store on a platter that size using early 2000s hard drive tech...

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qdvt@reddit

the forbidden cutoff wheel

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Few_Ad_8627@reddit

Man, that fucker’s Huuuge!

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Jemm971@reddit

At the time we made entire programs, games, etc. with 16KB.

Now we take 10GB to do the same. People don't realize but 10GB!!! It's huge. I never understood how it could have swelled so much...

Because it’s not with lines that we code, even if we coded 1 million lines (a lifetime of coding!) What would we achieve? 10MB max?? So what’s in these 9.99GB??? Come on, let's be crazy, I'm adding 100 images of 500KB, so 50MB. That's another 9.94GB which is used for what???

That’s not possible… the compilers fill it with yogurt to gain weight. I don't see any other explanation!😮‍💨

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grumpy44134@reddit

I wonder how much data that platter could hold using today's recording technology?

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CaperGrrl79@reddit

I could swear upside down that my brother told me a story about a platter or HDD that actually somehow rolled away, down some stairs and then shattered.

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Much-Specific3727@reddit

Is this real? It's not the platter that surprises me but what the hell motor brought this up to speed? A d was was the speed? 360rpm?

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Performer-Pants@reddit

If you had those as wheels

Boy, it’d be hard(to)drive

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crc_73@reddit

The 1's and 0's are chiseled onto the surface.

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jujumber@reddit

imagine looking at it with a microscope and seeing little 1's and 0's

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macross1984@reddit

In a span of just little over 60 years, from 10mb HD to terabytes of SSD. How storage technology advanced in so little time.

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mallardtheduck@reddit

That's just the platter... The actual drive is about the size of a washing machine.

Also, the earliest references I can find to drives with a capacity of >= 10MB per platter are from the 1970s, so it's likely that this is one platter from a drive with a total capacity of 10MB if it's truly from the 60s.

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DeepDayze@reddit

Most minicomputer systems may have like 4 to 8 of these max per system so that's up to 2.4GB of data.

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Impossible_Stomach26@reddit

4 to 8 units at 10mb each ?= 2.4gb ?

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DeepDayze@reddit

My bad misread the number of MB's. so 240MB max may be the max if each platter is 10mb with 3 per disk pack...was thinking 100mb per platter.

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Nigel_melish01@reddit

We had 300mb per pack

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Bymmijprime@reddit

At first glance, I really thought that was a wooden shield.

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shallowwell2@reddit

10mb in 1960 is like 100petabytes now

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Practical_County_501@reddit

Looks like a giant grinding disk. How far we have come.

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abagofcells@reddit

I kinda want to make a wind chime from a stack of those.

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DeepDayze@reddit

They'd sound like gongs in the wind!

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Captainpaul81@reddit

I worked on these similar discs in the Navy in the early 2000s

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No-Function-9174@reddit

Had similar ones and possibly larger ones on Burroughs computer at the Pasadena city college in late 60's . Have been looking for a picture for a long time. Thanks.

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thestargazingpenguin@reddit

And I'll bet the computer salesmen were still telling everyone it would be all the storage they'll ever need!

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new2bay@reddit

Here, perhaps: https://www.reddit.com/r/retrobattlestations/comments/624449/my_professor_brought_in_a_10mb_hard_disk_from_the/

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b33znutz@reddit (OP)

That's probably it!

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Joonicks@reddit

that certainly isnt a floppy...

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Long-Trash@reddit

i hope he didn't get any fingerprints on that disk. it would need a very sensitive cleaning before it could be remounted. /s/s/s :-)

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nomadismyname@reddit

Here I am thinking it was a large disc brake!

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Nigel_melish01@reddit

Back on the day we used multi layered disks that were 300mb each. Used to scan images to them for the printing industry. As I remember they were 1,800 dollars each. Crosfield Electronics.

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Klutzy_Cat1374@reddit

I still used them in the 80s at the college. They were behind bullet proof glass because if they shattered they would break your shins.

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BrakkeBama@reddit

OP, "mb" means "millibits". What you want is "MB" in UPPERcase. Learn your ISO, m=milli M=mega b=bits B=bytes.

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b33znutz@reddit (OP)

Learn my ISO? Or maybe watch out for autocorrect on my phone because it likes to do funny things. Sorry to offend you.

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BrakkeBama@reddit

Not offended. Just correcting you so other don't pick up bad habits.
If I mixed up M with m and b with B in my physics and Chemistry classen in High school and University it would cost me whole grades on homework, reports and papers.

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sputwiler@reddit

I guess the filesystem on this disk is case insensitive.

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gbarnas@reddit

You're kind of right since the platter isn't in a case of any kind. 😁

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BrakkeBama@reddit

See my reply below.

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sputwiler@reddit

No such reply (404). Also, I /was/ half joking.

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BrakkeBama@reddit

Batter link hereto Wikipedia then.

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RevolutionarySeven7@reddit

LOL. Click this link and [READ this and learn] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_system#Base_units), dumb*ss. 🤣

dude, grow the hell up, nobody knows this in the common world. it's the equivalent to criticizing common people for not knowing medical latin terminology. and here is another example. I, personally know what you are talking about because it was in my job profession too, but outside my job, nobody knows, so a MB and mb is the same for many. same as people now refer the "internet" to just "wifi", unfortunately. nobody cares. very likely everybody here already knew OP was referring to MEGABYTES

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BrakkeBama@reddit

dude, grow the hell up,

I'm 49 years old and University schooled.

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b33znutz@reddit (OP)

Lol

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