I hope there is a backup...

I was around when a giant HD was disassembled at a USAF base in the mid-90's, it was the size of a dorm refrigerator, was used for telemetry data collection and at least early 70's vintage, 12" platters. The guys who took it apart got permission from Security to repurpose the platters as wall clocks.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2022 12:36PM by Will Collier.

That is about right, though there were smaller designs which had similar capacities by 1979.

Going back a bit farther, my former boss used to be a field service guy for CDC. His active period doing that included working on hard drives with hydraulic actuators for the R/W heads and requiring uses of block and tackle or a chain fall to remove and replace components.

we had giant magnetic drums, I fergit what they were called, at the county center where I worked as a teen.

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!#$@@$#!

proofraed by OwEn the c@t.

That is a hell of a thumb drive

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Not sure if that was anywhere near state of the art in 1979. Here's what 300mb looked like in 1974.

[www.vintagecomputer.gallery]

Hal,

I saw a similar drive in-person at a local repair shop. They were an old school type of shop that fixed anything. Truly cool to see the drive and actually be able to touch it. Even though I went there to have a vacuum fixed, I ended up developing a relationship with the store and worked for them unofficially as their Mac repair guy. I had vastly more experience with Macs and could do in seconds what would take them hours. They ended up with several very happy customers, I got to play with Macs and made bucks in the process. Worked out nicely until the store closed for good.

Robert



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2022 05:30PM by Robert M.

I remember the removable platter drives on a DEC system… and mounting tapes… so many tapes. The IBM vacuum self threading drive was awesome…

Huh.

The first pic doesn't show up on my 'Phone (iOS 16), but it does in much older Safari 12.1.2/macOS 10.12.6.

The second pic shows up in both places.

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Not sure if that was anywhere near state of the art in 1979. Here's what 300mb looked like in 1974.

[www.vintagecomputer.gallery]

My first "real" job was as a field service engineer for General Instruments, install8ng and repairing POS systems for department store chains and payment processing systems for banks.

Gertz, a local chain in NY, used Ampex floating head removable platter disk drives like the one shown. I believe the capacity was 1 MB.

This was 1978 - 1982.

Other chains used rack mounted hard drives that weighed about 75 pounds, had 14" platters, and had a capacity of 5MB.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/09/2022 09:27PM by Cary.

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