1970s hard disk drive advertisement - photo

[Altair]

1970s hard disk drive advertisement.




Previously:

Floppy disk case - GIF
Hard drive crushing machines - GIF
4.5 megabytes of data represented by punch cards - photo

[Frank S]

Prices may have come down a little as the capacity increased over the years

[nova_robotics]

A 20TB hard drive is like $500 on Amazon. That's 2,000,000x the storage for about 3% the (inflation adjusted) cost. Unbelievable.

[bruce.desertrat]

It's been going down a long time. (and I think that XComp ad is from '81) This is what you got in 1956

50 24" platters
$3800 / month lease (you couldn't buy a computer from IBM then )
3.75 megabytes



https://petapixel.com/2014/10/29/tak...d800-raw-file/

I have our very first Novell file server's HDD sitting on the floor of my office Here's a pic with a much newer (but still quite obsolete!) 500GB 2.5" drive. A Micropolis 1.53 GB drive. We thought that was such a HUGE amount of space at the time. (Our total on-site storage is now on the order of 60 TB ) (I do not remember what we paid for it, but, I expect it was less than $3400, but not by much...

The original photo on my phone would just barely fit on the IBM drive above.

[Ed]

When I first started in IT, I think that then, the cost was more reasonable at about AU$280 to $340 for a 10Mb drive, roughly 2/3rds of my weekly wage, I think that was about 1986.

[Karl_H]

We had an academic group of 5 of us and we pooled resources to get a 20 MB hard drive to go with our shared Apple Mac Macintosh Classic Computer. We were the laughing stock of the College because we got such a huge hard drive. Mind you, at that time, we had Microsoft Word - the entire program - on one 720 KB 3.5 floppy disc.

[schuylergrace]

I had one of those drives in college in the early '80s. It cost considerably less than that from the salvage store. We got it as part of a project to make our homebrew S-100 bus computer speak like the sexy computer in the "Dark Star" movie. 10 meg was an insane amount of memory, but it turned out to be too slow for what we were trying to do, so we had to build an extended chassis to fill with RAM boards we designed. By the time we got done, we had a big box sitting in the living room with lights worthy of the original Star Trek's computers and some halting digitized speech from recordings we made of one of our girlfriends' voice.

[NeiljohnUK]

[QUOTE=bruce.desertrat;206172]It's been going down a long time. (and I think that XComp ad is from '81) This is what you got in 1956

50 24" platters
$3800 / month lease (you couldn't buy a computer from IBM then )
3.75 megabytes



Looks like a 'drum' store unit, with the heads translating up and down the outside of a spinning cast iron drum there was always the danger of one touching and initiating a catastrophic failure, we had a strict no entry to the computer room because one had failed and embedded chunks of drum in the concrete walls at Fawley power station. Hell we even still had a working video wire recorder in another station, steel wire and high speed were pretty dangerous too if it broke.

I worked for Idiot Bloody Management back in the 90's, we still had the house sized CNC machining cells in use making 18" platter 20 Mb hard drives to support the 25 and 50 year contracts still running.

[dagrizz]

Not sure, but I think I still have my first HDD, a 5Mb Western Digital 5-1/4" full height monster, acquired in '82 while working for Radio Shack. I know I have a Seagate ST30 attached to an old Tandy Model 2000 test chassis; that was one of the first 3-1/2" 30Mb drives in existence.

[jackhoying]

My first hard drive was a 10MB, but it came in a computer for about $3000.00 in 1980. I remember upgrading to a 20MB drive a year later and thinking that I'd never run out of storage space!!