50th Anniversary of the First Hard Drive 225
ennuiner writes "Over at Newsweek Steven Levy has a column commemorating IBM's introduction of the first hard drive 50 years ago. The drive was the size of two refrigerators, weighed a ton, and had a vast 5MB capacity. They also discuss the future of data storage." From the article: "Experts agree that the amazing gains in storage density at low cost will continue for at least the next couple of decades, allowing cheap peta-bytes (millions of gigabytes) of storage to corporations and terabytes (thousands of gigs) to the home. Meanwhile, drives with mere hundreds of gigabytes will be small enough to wear as jewelry."
Back of the Envelope Calculation (Score:4, Informative)
Let's take jewlery-sized to mean 1 cm^2 of usable area. And take 100s of GB to be 100 GB, or 10^11 bytes, so ~10^12 bits. Pop these in a 10^6 x 10^6 grid. Then we have 10^-2 / 10 ^ 6 = 10^-8 m to be the length/width of a bit. A hydrogen atom is ~ 10^-10m (I think Iron is ~2.5 times that size). So roughly, bits would be a maximum of 100 x 100 atoms, but probably more towards 50 x 50.
That is pretty small!
Re:What, no pictures? (Score:3, Informative)
When you need to license for the web you need extended rights - how long will you keep the article available for, across multiple markets. Newspapers are getting better at this, and will continue to do so, especially as they derive more and more revenue from the internet. For now though, we just have to wait.
Re:Back of the Envelope Calculation (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What, no pictures? (Score:3, Informative)
http://images.google.com/images?q=ibm+ramac [google.com]
more info (Score:4, Informative)
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/05/19/1956-fi
its an ibm document about the drive (and some other hard ware)
It has a picture, and some more technical info!
Re:Butterfly test (Score:3, Informative)
They've been part of the Jargon File [catb.org] since its inception.
Re:What, no pictures? (Score:3, Informative)
or google image, like suggested above, though it is disappointing the original article didn't have pictures of the giants
Re:Punch Cards? (Score:2, Informative)
The whole idea was "random access" not "serial access" - punch cards and mag tape you need to shuffle thru the pile of cards, or run down the tape end to end.
Restoration Effort Underway (Score:3, Informative)