

A 1956 Hard Drive - srikar
http://old-photos.blogspot.com/2011/06/hard-drive.html

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koenigdavidmj
And of course if you wrote a program to move the read-write arm in certain
ways you could make it walk around the room. Or block the door, requiring that
a hole be cut in the wall to get back in there.

An old professor of mine described these as like a `washing machine in heat'.

------
gnosis
_"The hard drive pictured weighed over 1 ton, and was capable of storing 5 Mb
or data."_

Considering that personal computers in the early 80's often sported a whopping
4k of RAM, 5 Mb in 1956 was quite a respectable amount of storage.

I'm frankly surprised they managed to get 5 Mb on any type of media back in
1956. It's a wonder they had enough data to fill it.

~~~
astrodust
It took a hell of a long time to fill that thing up with torrents. For one,
there weren't many seeders...

