
What 200MB looked like in 1970 - sinzone
http://www.buzzfeed.com/lolicitation/200mb-in-1970-yfs
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hernan7
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...](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Road_Sign_Peru_Prohibido_Tocar_Bocina.jpg)

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

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anigbrowl
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depended on technology that was about 5-10 years out of date.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.

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

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blasdel
It's about 18" in diameter.

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

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

I say it's my FORTRAN compiler.

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

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zitterbewegung
Given the same volume what is that now 20tb?

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sinzone
I think a way more of 20TB

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jackowayed
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.

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

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

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jackowayed
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.

