Free 186 More Best Homemade Tools eBook:  
Get tool plans

User Tag List

Results 1 to 4 of 4

Thread: 1956 IBM 5MB hard disk drive - photos

  1. #1
    Supporting Member Altair's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2013
    Posts
    12,020
    Thanks
    1,365
    Thanked 30,299 Times in 9,998 Posts

    186 More Best Homemade Tools eBook

  2. #2
    Supporting Member hemmjo's Avatar
    Join Date
    Feb 2017
    Posts
    2,659
    Thanks
    251
    Thanked 1,514 Times in 855 Posts

    hemmjo's Tools
    Isn't that crazy!!!! Now you can get 1TB on a microSD card. That is 200,000 times more than that hard drive.

    2,000+ Tool Plans

  3. #3
    Supporting Member
    Join Date
    Mar 2017
    Posts
    596
    Thanks
    284
    Thanked 222 Times in 150 Posts
    50 years ago I drove truck delivering similar pieces for HP from their Gaithersburg, MD (a rural town, then) facility to Emery Air Freight (before Fed Ex) at DCA. I don't recall their megabyte capacity, but the guys at HP were terrific and as home spun as you could want.

  4. #4
    Supporting Member NeiljohnUK's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2017
    Posts
    687
    Thanks
    61
    Thanked 249 Times in 176 Posts

    NeiljohnUK's Tools
    Er, no that's NOT a hard disc, that's a drum store.

    The lower photo shows the drum clearly, and the moving head bar that translated the multiple heads up and down the few inches required to read/write over the whole of the drums surface. The heads however were often part of the explosive drum failure mode these things suffered from, as the cast iron drum would break up if a head came loose and scored the drum, or worse jammed hard into it. When built Fawley power station had these for the computers, all discrete component machines of that time, one of the drum stores exploded and wrecked most of the computer it served, with chunks of the drum still embedded in the computer room walls when the station was demolished, needless to say no-one was allowed beyond the newly installed blast doors whilst the computers were running after that. When IBM delivered newly developed 5Mb 'Winchester' disc-drives, developed at IBM Hursley, near Winchester, to the station the drum stores thankfully became redundant and we were allowed into the computer rooms to swap boards again, that was in the late 70's. When I worked as a "your only a f'king contractor" for IBM in the 90's they were still manufacturing those long obsolete 5Mb drives as they were contractually obliged to support or replace them for 50 years!



    2,000+ Tool Plans

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Bookmarks

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •