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Matt Meiser
10-21-2010, 5:10 PM
I just got a 1TB hard drive today for my NAS unit (which is non-functional because it is missing the CD and QNAP's web site has a problem that needs to be fixed by some guy in Taiwan who won't be in for several hours.) But I had to laugh as my first thought after pulling the 1TB drive out of the box was "this thing is huge!" No, not because it holds 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of data but because it is a 3.5" drive rather than the 2.5" laptop drives I've handled recently.

I've all but forgotten the 5.25" 1/2 height 10MB MFM hard drive from my first PC.

Howard Garner
10-21-2010, 6:08 PM
What, no 8 inch hard drives!

Ken Fitzgerald
10-21-2010, 6:12 PM
Matt,

The first hds I worked with on CT scanners in '76 were Dec RK-05. They stored 5 MB and the drive weighed 235 lbs.

Steve Schlumpf
10-21-2010, 6:34 PM
Yup - times sure have changed!

The first hard drive I can remember was back when I worked for TRW in Colorado Springs in 1980. They had a special refrigerated room built for 2 hard drives. They each held 1 meg! I am not kidding!

I still remember some of the old timers there telling us that they would NEVER fill those drives up! Course, back then 'the' computer (and I mean only one) modem had a baud rate of 3 bits per second! Wow! Hang onto your hat! All that speed was why they needed the extra cool room!

Yup.... times have changed some!

Matt Meiser
10-22-2010, 7:23 AM
I've only heard stories about the bigger drives. I got the drive I spoke of around 1991. I've seen 8" floppies but never used one as 5.25 was common by the time I started using them (that was what Apple was using on the IIe's and IIc's we had, anyway)

When the company I worked for before moved (around 2000) they found 8" floppies iin a closet in the IT area. We showed one to a co-op who thought it was some kind of gag.

Tom Winship
10-22-2010, 8:41 AM
You guys remind me of another story out of my past.
My last semester here at A&M, I had one course to graduate. It was an electrical engineering course on motors and generators. There were only two of us that were in the classs and they cancelled it.
With a wife and baby to support I had to get out of school and raced to see the head of the mechanical engineering dept. He looked at his catalog and said you could substiture this course, "It might be useful in your lifetime". The name of the course was Basic Computer Programming.
We had an IBM 610 (I believe), 709, and 1401. I can't remember their memory size, but you could have held a dance in any of the rooms.

Little did he know.

Bryan Morgan
10-22-2010, 4:48 PM
I just got a 1TB hard drive today for my NAS unit (which is non-functional because it is missing the CD and QNAP's web site has a problem that needs to be fixed by some guy in Taiwan who won't be in for several hours.) But I had to laugh as my first thought after pulling the 1TB drive out of the box was "this thing is huge!" No, not because it holds 1,000,000,000,000 bytes of data but because it is a 3.5" drive rather than the 2.5" laptop drives I've handled recently.

I've all but forgotten the 5.25" 1/2 height 10MB MFM hard drive from my first PC.

All the new server drives these days are 2.5" whether 10k or solid state :) They are a tad thicker than notebook drives and look just like mini versions of the 3.5" models. We were tossing out some old crap the other day and came across an old 47gig scsi drive. It was HUGE. 5.25 x 4 or 5" thick. Weighs a ton. There like 10 or 15 platters in there (we take everything apart because... well, why not?). The rare earth magnets in there are not like the magnets from your normal modern drive. They are way more powerful and I'd say downright dangerous. We put it mostly back together and wrote top secret on it and made it look official and placed it where its easily knocked off the desk to mess with people.

Bryan Morgan
10-22-2010, 4:51 PM
I've only heard stories about the bigger drives. I got the drive I spoke of around 1991. I've seen 8" floppies but never used one as 5.25 was common by the time I started using them (that was what Apple was using on the IIe's and IIc's we had, anyway)

When the company I worked for before moved (around 2000) they found 8" floppies iin a closet in the IT area. We showed one to a co-op who thought it was some kind of gag.

No CP/M for you eh? I remember those 8" floppies (man technology can sound dirty sometimes...:D ). We also dug some out when we were cleaning out a shop and showed people with the same result as you. Nobody believed they were real.

Matt Meiser
10-22-2010, 5:24 PM
No, we had some Commodore Pets in high school, but until I bought a 10MHz XT-clone to take off to college we always had Apples at home and school. Well, for a couple years we had an Atari 800 at home, which is what I wrote my very first program. People I knew had C64's. I do remember visiting an uncle in about 1982 and seeing him load a program from paper tape. And my dad used to bring used punch cards home for crafts so I've seen some of that stuff.

Things evolved rapidly while I was in college and by the time I graduated I had some kind of 486 variant running OS/2, and then Windows 95 came out about 6 months before I graduated. Also while in school our campus was wired with 10Base-T and for something like $100 we could buy the approved card for our computers to connect directly to the campus network. On the CD we got with it from the IT department was a funny little program called "Mosaic". My senior year we became one of the first schools in the country to mandate that incoming freshman buy a laptop--and they were ex-pen-sive!

Bryan Morgan
10-22-2010, 6:10 PM
No, we had some Commodore Pets in high school, but until I bought a 10MHz XT-clone to take off to college we always had Apples at home and school. Well, for a couple years we had an Atari 800 at home, which is what I wrote my very first program. People I knew had C64's. I do remember visiting an uncle in about 1982 and seeing him load a program from paper tape. And my dad used to bring used punch cards home for crafts so I've seen some of that stuff.

Things evolved rapidly while I was in college and by the time I graduated I had some kind of 486 variant running OS/2, and then Windows 95 came out about 6 months before I graduated. Also while in school our campus was wired with 10Base-T and for something like $100 we could buy the approved card for our computers to connect directly to the campus network. On the CD we got with it from the IT department was a funny little program called "Mosaic". My senior year we became one of the first schools in the country to mandate that incoming freshman buy a laptop--and they were ex-pen-sive!

I had a C64, Apple ][+ (original, made in 1978) and an Adam (audio cassette data drives! SLOW) before migrating to the x86 (8088) stuff and started running BBSs (HPVAC underground stuff :p ). I loved that C64. I will probably buy another one of these days off ebay. I really miss those old days. Everything was so new and I learned so much back then.... not that I know everything these days but I rarely get excited about anything. The sales people and master BSers have taken over (cloud computing? meh...)

Art Mulder
10-22-2010, 6:56 PM
It isn't just computers, Matt... All over the offtopic area of SMC I see people talking about flat screen TVs, and I'm always stunned at all the people who seem to have a TV that is LARGER than 42"

Matt Meiser
10-22-2010, 7:27 PM
No, its not. Another example, my current cell phone beats the pants off any computer I had in college. And cost a lot less too. My first cell phone was probably 5x the size (and I had a relatively small one) and could just barely make phone calls ("Can you hear me now?")

And we have something like 20 IP-enabled devices in our house. Including two cell phones.

I think I posted this before, but a while back my 8YO daughter asked my wife what "One Hour Photo" was. My wife told her to think about it, which she did, and responded, "You mean it takes an HOUR to download you pictures ?!?" She simply doesn't know that cameras weren't always digital. We've been digital since she was 3. She even has her own digital camera courtesy of her uncles.

Steve Costa
10-22-2010, 7:39 PM
1401s, 1410s, 360s, 370s, punched cards, tape drives, CRTs and programmers who never thought their programs would still be in use in 2000!!!

And let us not forget VM, MVS, CICS and multiple DOS partitions running under VM.

The good ole days, well sort of!!!

Glenn Vaughn
10-22-2010, 8:10 PM
I have a working TRS-80 Model III in the garage. Bought it new for $1500 with no hard drives. My first computer was a 16K (16384 bytes of memory) TRS-80 Model I Level II - Cost $1100 with no disk drives. It uses a cassette recorder.

Van Huskey
10-23-2010, 4:53 AM
and I'm always stunned at all the people who seem to have a TV that is LARGER than 42"


They make TVs SMALLER than 42" today????? I thought 42" flat panels were for bathrooms, kitchens and closets...

Brian Elfert
10-23-2010, 11:06 AM
The ONLY reason I have a 50" TV is because the best TV I could find in my price range only comes in 50" or 60". I would have been okay with 42" or even 37". I had a 27" TV before recently buying my HDTV. To get a picture as tall as my 27" TV required go to a minimum of a 37" TV. I only have ONE TV in my house. (Not counting the unused 27" that needs to go.) I am not the guy that spends thousands on a new TV every few years because a larger and better model came out.

Most servers do have 2.5" drives if bought new today, but where I work we have mostly 3.5" drives in our servers. Our last set of servers is from 2008 and we had the choice of 2.5" or 3.5". We choose 3.5" due to cost. Most everything is on VMWare ESX now so we are not buying servers very often now. We are getting three more servers for VSphere and I assume those are 2.5".

Joe De Medeiros
10-23-2010, 1:12 PM
1401s, 1410s, 360s, 370s, punched cards, tape drives, CRTs and programmers who never thought their programs would still be in use in 2000!!!

And let us not forget VM, MVS, CICS and multiple DOS partitions running under VM.

The good ole days, well sort of!!!

You forgot disc packs, and punch tapes and core memory.

Joe De Medeiros
10-23-2010, 1:16 PM
I've only heard stories about the bigger drives. I got the drive I spoke of around 1991. I've seen 8" floppies but never used one as 5.25 was common by the time I started using them (that was what Apple was using on the IIe's and IIc's we had, anyway)

When the company I worked for before moved (around 2000) they found 8" floppies iin a closet in the IT area. We showed one to a co-op who thought it was some kind of gag.

I use to do backups where I worked using disc packs, that went into a drawer on the main frame this was around 1979.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d8/Nashua_diskpack.jpg/800px-Nashua_diskpack.jpg

Brian Elfert
10-23-2010, 5:15 PM
Somebody at work recently found a disk pack like that in a back room somewhere. Amazing to think they used to use stuff like that.

Bill Cunningham
10-23-2010, 11:01 PM
20 years ago, I wrote an article for the 20 year Anniversary Issue of Canadian Data System Magazine, about the changes in computer technology over the first 20 years of the magazine..I still have the issue..My god!!! 40 years.. Compared to what we are using now, we might as well have been running Babbage machines ha.. I shudder to think of what my grandchildren will be using 40 years from now! Actually I'm jealous because I won't be here then.. I think I'll miss the holodeck the most ;)

Art Mulder
10-24-2010, 8:26 AM
This thread reminds me of this video... (http://www.youtube.com/alyankovic#p/f/66/qpMvS1Q1sos) :p:cool:

Rich Engelhardt
10-24-2010, 8:52 AM
but a while back my 8YO daughter asked my wife what "One Hour Photo" was. My wife told her to think about it, which she did, and responded, "You mean it takes an HOUR to download you pictures ?!?"
LOL! That's hilarious!
Moreso because I met my wife at a Foto-Mat. She was friends of one of the girls that worked @ the Foto-Mat, and we met one day when both of us stopped to talk to the girl while she was working.
To think, ~ 30 years of happy wedded bliss may never have happned w/out the One Hour thing.

Bit OT, but, I have a Lafayette catalog sitting on my computer desk that I picked up from their store back in 1968.
Plastered on the front cover is the "Miracle of the Space Age" - the IC chip!

Bryan Morgan
10-24-2010, 9:11 PM
I think I posted this before, but a while back my 8YO daughter asked my wife what "One Hour Photo" was. My wife told her to think about it, which she did, and responded, "You mean it takes an HOUR to download you pictures ?!?" She simply doesn't know that cameras weren't always digital. We've been digital since she was 3. She even has her own digital camera courtesy of her uncles.

Haha my little sister didn't know what LPs were. She always called them "big black CD's" :) Kids today probably don't even know what a CD is...:p

Bill Cunningham
10-24-2010, 10:29 PM
Haha my little sister didn't know what LPs were. She always called them "big black CD's" :) Kids today probably don't even know what a CD is...:p

HehHeh.. Try explaining a 8 track!

Ken Fitzgerald
10-24-2010, 10:50 PM
The first real computers I worked with were Dec 1105's and Dec 1134's. The disk drives were initially Dec RK05's. Later they were replaced by Diablo disc drives with 10 platter removeable stacks.

I got my professional nickname while living and working in Chicago. One winter night all the field engineers in the city were busy and I needed to change a Diablo disc drive. The drive weighed over 200 lbs. This drive was in a CT scanner at Silver Cross Hospitial in Joliet. So, I drove to United
Airlines Air Cargo at Ohare and got United to place the disk drive in wooden crate in the back of my Chevy Citation company car. They used a fork lift.

At the hospital, a guard helped me get it out of my car and into the scan room.

At the time, CT and nuc med shared a common control room. They had one of the old style desk chairs that raised and lowered the seat by rotating the seat and the threaded pedestal climbed up or down on the base. The chair had no arms or back on it.....just the seat. So, as luck would have it, that disc drive I needed to replace was the lowest thing in the equipment rack and about 16" above the floor.

I unbolted the top of the crate containing the new hd and the sides came with it. I placed it on the floor next to the new drive sitting on the bottom of the wooden crate.

I rolled the chair into the computer room and screwed the seat up until it touched the bottom of the defective disc drive. I removed the ribbon cables, and unbolted it from the slides. With the bad hd on the chair, I rolled it into the room where the top of the crate was and tilted it onto that top.

I walked the new hd out to the edge of the crate bottom and tipped it onto the chair. I used the chair to wheel it into the computer room and installed it, formatted it, bad blocked it and loaded software.

I tipped the old hd off the top of the crate onto the bottom. Installed the top and made arrangements for a trucking company to pick it up the next day.

The company's trade name for CT scanners was "Delta Scan" and I received the nickname "Delta Gorilla" as nobody else had ever changed one of those disc drives by themselves. I never did tell those idiots I didn't lift the 200 lb.+ hd:D