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First real Thumb-Drive? Erco Alert! — Parallax Forums

First real Thumb-Drive? Erco Alert!

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  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-07-31 02:56
    Eeewwwe.

    You know, back last century I had a 1Gbyte hard drive. A Quantum "Big Foot" imagine the external version of that now...
  • GadgetmanGadgetman Posts: 2,436
    edited 2014-07-31 04:54
    you had a quantum bigFoot?

    I'm so sorry for you. Who did you wrong to suffer such a punishment?

    The BigFoot was so named because it's a 5.25" form-factor drive. They built'em big to reduce the number of platters and thereby also reduce the number of heads and accompanying electronics.
    Larger platters can't spin as fast as small ones... And these ran at 3600RPM when 'everyone else' were using 3.5" drives running at 5400 or 7200 RPM already.
    Didn't add any cache on them, either.
    A Typical beancounter idea... The only reason it sold was because some big box-pushers were also staffed with beancounters trying to underbid each other.

    Back to the stuff at hand...

    That finger needs a dab of cetchup...
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-07-31 05:28
    Gadgetman,

    Nooo...I love my BigFoot. It's, well, big and quiet. I still have it somewhere. I wonder if it still works.

    It's a long story...

    You could say it was my fault. I was the bean counter at the time. I was building my second PC in early 1997. My first was a 20MHz 386 IBM PS/2 from a dumpster, it had spent it's young life in a bank. This was a 120MHz AMD 486. Awesome!

    I was not very enthusiastic about having a PC. Until we went 32 bit with the 368 the architecture was horrible and you could still not get a proper 32 bit OS from MS unless you shelled out for NT. For sure I did not want NT anyway. I knew it was Smile having managed to make it totally crash out with the first ever program I wrote for it. Hopeless.

    So I was not willing to spend a penny more than necessary on a PC. But I wanted to see if I could get this new fangled Linux thing up and running.

    My immediately previous machines had been ATARI 520's. The last time I had checked prices of a hard drives for them they were in the hundreds of pounds for 20 megabytes or so. Crazy. I never did by one. The old IBM was 70MB or so.

    So, when the time came to get a hard drive for my new creation there were two options in the PC store I happened to be in. A 500MB something or other or the 1GB BigFoot which was only a tad more expensive. Bejeesu what? A whole gigabyte? You are kidding me? So, breaking my penny pinching rule, I bought it.

    Me and that old 486 + BigFoot + Linux were very happy for quite some time.
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,069
    edited 2014-07-31 05:58
    Even thebigfoot was a tiny hdd compared to my washing machines that were removable 10MB 6high 19" platters where the heads had to be adjusted every 3 months or you risked the heads moving off track. Average access time was 45ms. microSD cards make these drives look absolute monsters.
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-07-31 06:51
    Speaking of washing machines. The first hard drive I ever got to use on machine that could almost be described as a personal computer was a big blue box the size of a washing machine with a 19" patter supplied by Intel to go with their development system for the 8080/8085. Probably about 10MBytes.

    Well one day in 1981 I was busy building our assembler code on it, for a 6809 project actually, and it started to rock'n'roll like a demented washing machine. Everyone looked up to see what was going on. Sure enough the head had crashed and everything was kaput. Being the youngest engineer around everyone looked at me as if it was my fault. No worries the next day an Intel field service engineer came out and replace the platter. The old one had a beautiful shiny scratch in the red rust of the magnetic coating down to the aluminium underneath where the head had been grinding away.

    That system with its 10MB drive, three eight inch floppies and an 8085 processor must have cost 30,000 pounds or so. The MDS box on it own was 10K.

    Ahhh, those were the days...
  • ercoerco Posts: 20,256
    edited 2014-07-31 07:21
    Thumbs up on that flashdrive.

    All this chatter about external storage has me missing my Sony StorStation/Ditto tape drive....

    Just kidding. That was the slowest, least reliable piece of junk I ever owned.

    And I own a Corvair. Doh! Did I actually say that?
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,069
    edited 2014-07-31 07:44
    I remember the drum discs. IIRCthey were Univac. They must hsve been about 8 feet long and about 4 feet in dia. I have no idea of their capacity.

    Yes, head crashes can leave a mess of oxide powder and aluminium. As an engineer, you then have to find the cause before youclean the drive, replace the damaged heads, and release the drive back to the customer.
  • blittledblittled Posts: 681
    edited 2014-07-31 08:02
    I'm going to make the rule of thumb for my household to use these thumb drives :)
  • Heater.Heater. Posts: 21,230
    edited 2014-07-31 08:05
    The cause. Ha ha I think I know. In the user manual for that drive was a diagram of what looked like a huge rock on a flat plane with a hammer flying along sideways at one tenth the size of the rock above the plane and crashing into the rock.

    That "rock" was representative of the size of a smoke particle compared to the head/platter distance.

    Now it just so happened that half the people in that lab were smokers.....
  • Peter KG6LSEPeter KG6LSE Posts: 1,383
    edited 2014-07-31 08:08
    I remember the first USB flash drive from * disk on key* It was 16 MB and was about 180 bucks .


    blazing fast USB 1.1 ..........
  • Cluso99Cluso99 Posts: 18,069
    edited 2014-07-31 08:10
    heater, yes I remember that diagram! The disc was going 100mph and the heads fly aerodynamically 10 microns from the surface.
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