via +Carlos Sang
Reshared post from +Tyler Gillies
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Ever wonder what a 5MB hard drive looked like in 1956?
In the year I was born computer hard drive were big monstrous things. This 5MB was so big it needed it's own plane to deliver it to where it was going.
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Was that a hard drive or was it a magnetic drum? I thought they didn't have hard drives back then.
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." — Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943.
How wrong could he have been?
Yep, that's a drum. I remember them from old textbooks.
I remember them in person.
I rem the huge disk drives, like a huge turntable, that you would switch out for backups. They were heavy and bulky to switch out.
During a digital electronics prac one of the demostrators decided to try tricking us with historical equipment. He was rather disappointed when I recognised ferrite core memory and ran to the physics museum. He was entirely crestfallen when I said "mercury delay line" before he even asked me what it was.
Man, I've used core, but never even SEEN delay line in person.