One meter diameter disk drive platter !
Heater.
Posts: 21,230
I have always know that old disk drives came in huge diameters but this one from a 60's vintage ICL 2066 computer at the The National Museum of Computing is the biggest I have ever heard of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi93VhHSLNk
It makes it appearance at the 7 minutes 50 second mark.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi93VhHSLNk
It makes it appearance at the 7 minutes 50 second mark.
Comments
I have never seen a cabinet big enough to hold that!
I still have some HP 10MB platters kicking around here.
But I do recall Drum drives. OTC (the overseas telecom section in Oz) had a pair of Univac 418 IIRC with Drums. The Drums were housed in a cabinet about 8-10 feet long, 5 feet high and 4 feet wide. Most of the area was the drum mounted lengthwise and there were many heads every 1 foot apart. They were used to store the telexs/telegrams for transmission overseas in the early 1970's (probably from the late 60's). They had a glass viewing section in the drum cabinet and was amazing to watch.
FYI the removable 6 platter high 10MB discs used on the Friden/Singer/ICL System Ten were mounted in a washing machine sized drive. In 1976 the drives cost $16,000 a piece, and the discs cost around $400 each. Average access time was 43ms. Normal read or write time for 10MB was 5 minutes. I wrote a program that could read in 1m45s and write in 3m22s by interleaving the sectors and used this as a basis for a disc copy program I sold that reduced a 10MB copy from 10 minutes to 3m22s.
Compare that to a microSD Ultra 8GB for $7.50. Then add in the inflation effect. Some progress hey !!!
Failures were often spectacular on those guys with that big, heavy, spinning drum and those close flying heads!!
The wiki article I read to refresh my memory said they came in at 6oz per kilobyte! How much does that 64GB micro-SD card my cat had weigh???
They loaded IBM card data to tape and output reports and data were also written to tape. Output reports were printed off-line and cards punched off-line!
I found this old brochure in the GE 400 series http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/GE/GE.GE-400.1968.102646147.pdf
We used COBOL but apparently it could do BASIC, FORTRAN, etc...
When I started working there in spring of 1973 they had a new, fancy Honeywell 6000 computer (Honeywell bought GE computing).
It had an analog meter on the console showing the instruction execute rate. I remember seeing this big fixed disk drive but not a meter in diameter!
My first boss had programmed on the UNIVAC computer at GE Appliance Park.
I wouldn't be surprised if they had to be corrected for the coriolis force!
Another interesting room in the museum has old electromagnetic punched--card processing machinery,
which are a mix of precision mechanical engineering, relay and valve decision logic, fascinating and very rare
I believe.
Thanks for posting that. A bit of a trip back through memory lane. That was a big disk drive, but I'm pretty sure not the biggest one ever made. I saw one at the CN building in Toronto that was probably bigger. It looked like an elevator motor with 3 or 4 platters on each side and had hydraulically activated head carriages with read/write heads nearly as big as hockey pucks. IIRC it held a massive 1 MB of data.
I've got a 12 - 13" one. It's about the size of a vinyl record, and or video laser disk.
With those old formats, it would be possible to visualize the bits with the naked eye. The video disk is actually an analog track. You can see it like you can the grooves on an audio record. Didn't even hold a movie. Just half of one. Flip the disk, get popcorn, continue.
Funny, at one point I marveled at how things were not human scale any more. Really, they sort of still were. Now it's all really small. Perspective...
One had to be very nice to and respectful of the holy men that tended the temple where the great machine lived. Upset them in any way and your playtime was over. They used to ***** at me for hogging all the time on the pen-plotter.
It was just at that time the likes of the Z80 and 6502 were being cooked up so we had yet to see the micro-processors that were about to destroy that temple.
When I was at Collins Radio there was a small magnifying glass with some fine ferrous material inside that you could put on top of the mag tape and see the data bits. You could actually see bad spots that the tape drive could not read. I tried it on a 19" 1 meg platter and I could see some sort of pattern but I doubt it would have been possible to make out the individual bits. Might have been possible to see them on older lower density platters though.