Saturday, December 27, 2008

World's First Hard-Disk Drive

Computer geeks the world over can thank the people at IBM for today's Hard-Disk Technology was introduced about half a century and revolutionized our lives. The first Hard-Disk was called the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit and it was huge, I mean it was man-sized dude. It was revealed to the world on September 4 1956 and it changed the way Computer Geeks stored their info. Before the IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit storage unit was created, Technology Geeks used storage drums to store information.

The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit had a 24" diameter disks and could only store about five megs of data, about the size an average MP3 file. This is actually pretty amazing considering that today, there are companies that offer data warehouse solutions, incorporating thousands of terabytes of storage space for their customers.

The IBM 350 Disk Storage Unit weighed about one ton and required special shipping and handling, see image. Today, you will only find this peice machinery in a museum but it is amazing how Computer Geeks have transformed this hunk of metal into the sleek and powerful hard-drives that we use today.

2 comments:

Flo said...

Wait a minute, I think I worked on that :) My first job was on a computer that took up an entire, specially built room. We encode data on cards, keypunch, and the cards would be fed into the computer. I also played one of the first computer games. It was Star Trek and there were no graphics at all, it was all text. Ahh, good times....

Mr. Tech said...

lol Flo,

yes, good ole days... ;-)