Computer Technology in 1961
 

Computer drive 1961
Air bearing rotating disc 6,000 rpm

This seems to be remotely similar to todays hard drives, what do you think?

I'm not quite up on my computer history, did common PC drive technology come from the aircraft industry?

Link - Verdan's Memory Unit:
http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1961/1961%20-%201430.html

In the 1970's, I paid $70 for a 1.5MB disk pack. About equal to a HD 3.5" diskette.

In the early 70's, most personal computers (IBM, Compaq) cost $3000 and usually had two floppy disk drives (1.2Mb/disk). An optional 20Mb hard drive cost $2K. That's Mb, not Gb.

Sherwood

Early 1980's. The 1970's had the Apple I, the PET, the Altair, and the TI. I don't think the Trash-80 was out until 1980.

Oh, and the 5" floppy drive started out as 128K. Single sided, single density. We used to "double" the capacity of a floppy disk with a hole punch, then flipping it over.

And a harddrive was VERY VERY rare in the early 80's. Most had a single or dual floppies. The PS/2 standardized on dual 3.5" disks, but that was mid 80's.

Ah, the good old days, Lotus 1-2-3.

If you ever make it to the Bay Area, I highly recommend the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. I had a meeting there in November and spent about an hour walking around beforehand. My dad worked at TX Inst. when I was a kid and I recognized a lot of stuff in the museum he used to have around the house in the '70's. Very cool museum and free admission.

My father's first job out of college was as a salesman for IBM.

One day when I was little, he brought home a microcomputer (about the size of a dorm fridge) before he had to deliver it to a customer the next day and stayed up all night programming it to make an EBCDIC (it was IBM, after all) printout of Mickey Mouse.

My first computer was an IBM "portable" PC:

http://www.vintage-computer.com/imag...pcportable.jpg

My dad had a random 8½ floppy drive laying around as late as 2002.

Friend of mine has an original Altair computer, one of the first.

Ahhh, the life of having a 10 meg hard drive and its being 20% full... and being happy with it!

This was my first:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1243056859.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1243056872.jpg

No hard drive at first. Later, a 20 Meg Winchester unit with tape backup was installed. It died in the 1994 Northridge earthquake. I also used early Apples with cassette tapes or storage.

This was my first(see zee photo). My dad was an elementary school principal in a tiny Michigan town (South Lyon), and got this crazy idea to set up a computer lab at his school.....in 1979. We had a Commodore PET in our home, then later a VIC20, 64, then onward to Apples....

http://www.geocities.com/compcloset/...e_PET_2001.jpg

Oh yeah, more to the point, looking at memory and speed capacity of the past is not mind blowing. Thinking about the future is mind blowing. If you know where we have been, then your iphone can pretty much be labled 'magic' (yes, I'm familiar with the quote). But think where things will be in 20 years. Your 'cell phone' will be able to download and project movies, on demand, instantly. Which really just means that much better porn delivery is on the way.

I had one of those. The good ole 8080A processor!!!

I miss my commodore 64.

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2220/...ddb6bdc263.jpg

Father's first laptop.
Amazing machine that could edit text on the fly, save/copy/transfer, and print multiple copies after only a few hours with the dot-matrix printer.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1243101270.jpg

Dot matrix

brrrrzzzzzzpppppp

Whenever I see those old machines, first of all it brings back memories....like installing the first VAX Cluster in Canada and having 1.8gB of storage, made up of 456mb hard drives each the size of a filing cabinet. Or doing tech support (the only one) for the first 14 IBM PC's at Shell Canada, and seeing the lineups form behind each machine as they used Visicalc instead of programmed spread sheets. Sigh.

Then I get REALLY ticked at how much of my current machine, which is some several thousands of times faster than the first PC and which is not doing a heck of a lot more for me. Yes Word processing is better....but not that much better, my use of Excel would probably work as well on Visicalc (I know, I am not an MBA so I really don't know the Power of the PowerPoint to shape the Truth).

Don't even get me started on how good my first Apple (a Lisa) was.....

Dennis

The first Trash-80, the Model I came out in 1978 IIRC. The Model II with the 8" floppies came out around 1980. The Model II was the first available with a hard disk drive. The HD was the size of a large brief case and was 8 MByte. Just the HD drive retailed for $4500. A Model II with the full 256KB of memory and an 8 meg HD drive retailed for ove $8K. Note: that is 256K of memory !!

We started our software business (writing programs to rate auto and homeowners insurance) in 1978 using Model I's and progressed to Model II's and eventually PC-XTs and PC-ATs and on up from there. Quite an interesting experience it was in those early days.

I had (and think still have somewhere back at my parents' place) a Timex-Sinclair 1000 and an Atari 400 (with the membrane keyboard - probably THE single worst invention in the history of planet earth, maybe second only to rap music) and a cassette tape drive (which cost about $500). The 5.25" floppy disk drive was too expensive at almost $1000 back then...

when I worked for ryder trucking's main office
we upgraded from punch cards to paper tape

my first home box was a vic 20 then c64
later had a 8088 IBM

I still work on the descendant of OS/390...

I had a dot-matrix printer in college in 1996. It took me three loud, whirring hours to print a 20-page paper (after staying up until 3:00 in the morning to write it). The next morning I spent $90 I didn't have to buy a bubblejet.

I have a client that still uses a dot matrix. Wide format to boot.

I think you are off just a little bit.

IBM PC was introduced in 1981 and had 360K floppies until the introduction of the IBM AT in 1984. I sold a 10Mb hard disk for the first XT for $10K; The Seagate 20Mb half height was $5K in 1985 IIRC.

Don,
My erasable memory stands corrected. It was the early 80's.

I started with a Northstar computer in '79. It used the CPM OS.

Sherwood

I'm a little confused, are you guys saying the first PC's had no hard drive?

The flight computer unit I first gave a link to (Verdan) came to the USA under license from the UK (Elliott Brothers) in the military sector.

Link-2:
http://www.flightglobal.com/pdfarchive/view/1961/1961%20-%200456.html

The first PCs had no hard-drive. In fact, most started out without diskettes. They started with a tape drive using cassette tape. So you started up the machine and to load a program, you put the cassette in, then walked away for 5+ minutes while the program loaded.

At the time I was in high school, the PC to own was an Apple II. Apple pretty much concerned the market. Commodore should have done better, but the PET was limited and the VIC-20 wasn't an improvement. The C-64 was excellent, and that was my first machine. I used it through college.

My first PC was a Toshiba 1200HD in 1988. The HD was for Hard-disk. Mine had a 10MB hard-dive built in. It still fires up, but the display is cracked and only 1/2 works. I upgraded it all the way to DOS 6.1. And I used that machine through the mid 1990's, when I got a color notebook from work. I paid a lot for a combination memory upgrade card and 1200 baud modem. The machine had 2MB of memory!

Remember all of the programs to break the 640K barrier, to allow you to load drivers and parts of the OS into "high" memory so that you could run larger programs in main memory.

My other recollection of those days was that GE was freak'n cheap, and always bought some program that was not the industry standard. SuperCalc5 instead of Lotus 1-2-3, etc.

I just saw something like that in an old James Bind film, you just need a tape!

"What is 'Diamonds are forever', Alex?"

I don't remember any commercial/industrial computers that used compact cassettes. The early personal computers that used cassettes, you usually supplied the cassette recorder. And they worked on the principle of a modem. The output was 300 baud modem sounds, recorded by the cassette recorder. These were 30 characters per second. They were SLOW!

I still have my original Microsoft Mouse. It has two huge green buttons and a steel roller ball. I got it with my Ventura Publisher Ver 1 that ran on my Compaq lugable 4.77 Mhz powerhouse. It had 640 K of ram and a 10 meg hard drive. I also still have my Compaq DOS 2.2 operating system.

I had my sailboat hauled for a bottom job a couple of weeks ago. The boatyard used on old Okidata dot matrix to print invoices, etc. We used to sell that exact printer in the mid 80's. I asked about it and the girl in the office said the owner of the boatyard picked up the printer at a second hand store for $5 and was able to order ribbons from someplace on the internet??

I remember actually having to clean my mouse. You would get "mung" on the wheels and would need to scrape/clean them out. Optical ones are so much nicer.

These printers are old :). He does manage to find the ribbon cartridges on the Internet as well. There are a stack behind his desk.

In some ways, hard drive prices have gone up. This one cost $17.5 million:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/storage/?p=485&tag=nl.e589

Sherwood