The state of the art in 1956

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StewartR

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Here's a great picture of a 1956-vintage IBM hard disk being loaded onto a plane: https://www.businessinsider.com/picture-of-ibm-hard-drive-on-airplane-2014-1?r=US&IR=T

It had a massive capacity of 5MB, it weighed about a ton, and it cost $3,200 per month to lease.
By comparison I have a 1TB SSD in my PC which weighs about 100g, and it cost me about £100.

So my SSD has 200,000 times more capacity; it's 10,000 times lighter; and it's about 800 times cheaper (assuming £1=$2 in 1956, and assuming that purchase price is about 50x monthly leasing cost). Or make that 20,000 times cheaper allowing for inflation.

So overall my SSD is 200,000 x 10,000 x 20,000 = 40,000,000,000,000 times better. That's broadly in line with what Moore's Law might suggest: it's equivalent to a doubling in capability (capacity / size / cost) every 17 months, maintained for 63 years.

Remarkable.

EDIT - Link fixed. Thanks @Box Brownie
 
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I have a pretty good idea where I will be in 55 years time. It was made the year before I was born, my guess is I am in better condition. :)
Nice link.
 
Memory is much the same. In 1955 core memory worked out at about $1/bit.
I can buy 16Gb of non volatile USB storage the size of my thumb nail for £5; that amount of core would cost £48.9billion* and would take up at least 4.1 million cubic ft**.

*(1955: £1=US$2.80)
**A hangar for a 747-400 is only 3.9 million cubic feet.
 
Here is the thing though.

In the same amount of time into out future,

they will laugh at our internet, phones and SSD drive.

Roll over laughing at us
 
I remember when I started IT in about 1988 I was installing 10MB drives in commodore 8086 Pcs.
The biggest drive we could get was a 130MB Rodime/Maxtor drive it was RLL and weighed a ton.
 

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I had a friend who bought a second hand 10Mb full height Rodime in the mid 80's. Paid several hundred for it.
A few months in, it suffered a head 0 crash. He couldn't afford to replace it, so he opened it up, snipped off the remains of head 0, wired head 3 to be the new head 0, vacuumed out the dust'n'swarf, then reformatted it as a 7.5Mb drive...
 
Some of us of a certain age have been lucky I think to witness the changes in technology since, say about 1990. From, for example, having no personal computers at all to having one you can put in your pocket and use to video call the other side of the World.

I recall sometime in the 1990s buying my first PC. It was a Viglen and it had a 50MHz(!) processor.

Dave
 
I even remember the debug command still to entire the low level format utility on the RLL controllers.

g=c800:5
 
That was for the Western Digital boards. I had an Adaptec that needed g=c800:ccc
 
There's an interesting thread on The Register that started talking about the (expensive) Apple Lisa, with lots of guys reminiscing in the comments section.

I studied computer science at school in the mid 70s, and the text books we used had pop-out models of winchester hard drives, punched card readers etc because the kit simply wasn't available in schools then, though we did manage to visit the Philips computer facility in West Croydon to see the actual stuff in use. The school had a terminal connected to the Croydon Council mainframe in Tabner House, and were allocated a couple of hours online each week for the entire school. Programming was done in advance on punched tape, which was then run through the reader during our brief online sessions to see if the programs actually worked (generally not).

My intro to 'micro' computing was a Sinclair ZX81 that my younger brother bought as a kit with 16K RAM pack. Much later I owned an Apple ][e, eventually building my first PC on the kitchen table in '97.

I agree that the advances have been quite remarkable, though I'm not too sure how long Moore's law can continue before it bumps into the brick wall of physics.
 
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You could always tell which kids owned ZX80/81's because they typed with their thumbs. :p
 
Heres a tester then. Who remembers this. "New balls please". :)
 
Tori_T said:
I had a friend who bought a second hand 10Mb full height Rodime in the mid 80's. Paid several hundred for it.
A few months in, it suffered a head 0 crash. He couldn't afford to replace it, so he opened it up, snipped off the remains of head 0, wired head 3 to be the new head 0, vacuumed out the dust'n'swarf, then reformatted it as a 7.5Mb drive...
Click to expand...
The 10MB Rodimes were so unreliable that our engineers used to order three at a time from stores as there was then a chance they'd get one that wasn't DOA.
 
I hadn't realised HDDs were that old. They were relatively slow to catch on as the Honeywell 200 I operated at Quaker Oats in 1972/3 only had tape drives. There was a hard disk variant but QO's machine wasn't updated for at least a couple of years after I left.

The major breakthrough in the 80's was IBM's Winchester technology which led to drive sizes shrinking to 8" then 5.25"(etc.). I remember almost frying a couple of 8" drives at Wang's training school in 1985 when I powered them on with the transport locks engaged......
 
Though never directly in the infant IT industry like a lot of you guys, this thread has triggered memories of meeting and being taught, in I think it was an FE class or other course I was doing, a lady who was one of the lead people in the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office) project..................sadly I cannot remember her name.

Also seeing mention of Wang, when I was at school in the mid to late 60's into early 70's they had an arrangement with Birkbeck College and the school had a Wang terminal (no screen it was I think more like a very l large Telex terminal) that accessed the Birkbeck computer for one afternoon a week...........this was either for the maths (of which I was rubbish at :( ) or the science classes which I loved.

Finally, when I worked in NHS pathology between 1973 & 1980 they were going computerised and had a computer suite with all second hand DEC kit and the barrel drives even though in an airconditioned room head crashed on a regular basis!

Did I say finally.................. ;) In the 80's the company I worked for a company that bought an IBM System 36 (talk about a sizeable box in the corner of a room) and the programming company employed to program it messed up big time. I was involved in the internal scoping of the project and though it was in the brief that we needed to be able to enter telephone extension numbers of up to 5 digits, the programmers in their wisdom decided we were wrong and made it 4 digits. By the time during interim testing when we spotted it "they" claimed it was too late to make the changes, suggesting that as it was just one organisation (the MoD who were an important customer to us).....we 'just' needed to keep a manual record of the correct extension number...suffice to say my MD took them to court and won the case.

Ah, the joys of the growing pains of technology :LOL:
 
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ancient_mariner said:
Much later I owned an Apple ][e
Click to expand...

Was that the one that didn't have a hard drive? If so it was the first one I used, at work. Load the operating system, memory expansion and programme, all off 5.25" floppies, and finally the file itself. I've never used an Apple product since................! Then we moved on to an IBM with DOS. Having an HDD was a revalation. Then to Windows - WOW. Finally I could write a document from a spread sheet and have both documents open................ The only problem was it had to have a brain transplant because it was too slow for my fairly complex spread sheets.
Oh dear - I think I'm old...........:(
 
Jannyfox said:
Was that the one that didn't have a hard drive? If so it was the first one I used, at work. Load the operating system, memory expansion and programme, all off 5.25" floppies, and finally the file itself. I've never used an Apple product since................! Then we moved on to an IBM with DOS. Having an HDD was a revalation. Then to Windows - WOW. Finally I could write a document from a spread sheet and have both documents open................ The only problem was it had to have a brain transplant because it was too slow for my fairly complex spread sheets.
Oh dear - I think I'm old...........:(
Click to expand...

That's the one - beige box with a keyboard incorporated, 2 off 5 1/4 floppy drives on top, the a green screen above that. Run the OS on one drive, Appleworks on the second IIRC. I wrote my first proper CV using Appleworks, and with the embedded markup, it was just like creating a webpage.

I also remember being introduce to the IBM XT at work which had - miracluous - a hard drive. Can't remember what the word processing package was on the IBM, but I do remember being scornful about it at the time. The company (Welcome Research Labs) also had VM370 terminals everywhere by this stage, ad it was there that I first learned to hack a little.

The next company (British Biotech) that I joined in Jan 1990 had Macs everywhere, and it was amazing o be able to sit down at a machine and just start working without needing training or advice. I designed a bunch of new labs in Macdraw later that year. Bootnote - as a result of being so impressed by the Macs, when I started my own business in 2008 I bough a Macbook, not realising a) how much better windows had become for workflow management than OSX and b) not being aware that Apple hardware was not impressive either.
 
ancient_mariner said:
That's the one - beige box with a keyboard incorporated, 2 off 5 1/4 floppy drives on top, the a green screen above that. Run the OS on one drive, Appleworks on the second IIRC. I wrote my first proper CV using Appleworks, and with the embedded markup, it was just like creating a webpage.
Click to expand...

Yes, I'd forgotten the 2 floppy drives, but obviously it must have had more than one. I don't think ours had a word processor (we still had typing staff then........), think it was only a spread sheet. I was the only one in the department who used it, I think. My work was a cut above the average complexity even then. I do remember that saving a file back to floppy took upwards of 10 minutes - not something you did too often, only when you went to make a coffee. But if you did the slightest thing wrong the beast would freeze. I did once lose half a day's work that way.
We used Word Perfect/Lotus123 until the company changed to MS Office. Then I lost a lost of my files as they wouldn't convert and couldn't be recreated in time. Isn't technology wonderful?
 
I was going to add a short BASIC programme but I've forgotten it all!

I used to work for a software house in the early '80s when most software for home and small office use was cassette based but a few larger pieces of software were on ROM. When Elite (?) was released on a floppy, they sent a copy to the programmers where I worked with the boast that at last there was a way to stop stuff being copied. The boys in the back room sent back a dozen copies in the next day's post! (IIRC, they copied the disks bit by bit to get round the anti copying widget.)
 
Nod said:
I was going to add a short BASIC programme but I've forgotten it all!
Click to expand...

I had QuickBasic with my first home pc (Win3.1, I believe). It was running quite happily till a year and a bit ago when I replaced my XP box with Win10 and I haven't tried installing it (it did get copied onto CD from the original floppies a long time ago). I still have the book on the shelf............
 
My foirst experience of computers was in 1980 when I worked for a Rio Tinto Zinc subsidiary. We bought a couple of Commodore Pets to do our own computing and got into trouble with RTZ's data processing department as we should have been using their mainframe in the allotted hour per week using software they had written for us. Eventually, in 1981, we were officially allowed to buy a computer network (one computer and four terminals) running CPM+. My boss was told that he could buy a 5 MB hard drive (1/5 of a photo!) but he ordered the 10 MB version to future-proof it. He got into serious trouble, his boss moaning that we could never fill 5 MB, never mind 10.
 
Jannyfox said:
Yes, I'd forgotten the 2 floppy drives, but obviously it must have had more than one. I don't think ours had a word processor (we still had typing staff then........), think it was only a spread sheet. I was the only one in the department who used it, I think. My work was a cut above the average complexity even then. I do remember that saving a file back to floppy took upwards of 10 minutes - not something you did too often, only when you went to make a coffee. But if you did the slightest thing wrong the beast would freeze. I did once lose half a day's work that way.
We used Word Perfect/Lotus123 until the company changed to MS Office. Then I lost a lost of my files as they wouldn't convert and couldn't be recreated in time. Isn't technology wonderful?
Click to expand...
WordPerfect was a terrific product.
 
Nod said:
The boys in the back room sent back a dozen copies in the next day's post! (IIRC, they copied the disks bit by bit to get round the anti copying widget.)
Click to expand...
The more elegant way is to rewrite the widget so that it reports "okay" to the program on any disk. :cool: The disks they sent back would still be protected if copied conventionally.
 
It was done as quickly as possible with no regard to elegance!
 
Phil V said:
2030
Click to expand...
By then we'll have had probably another 200x improvement, if the rate of improvement since 1956 continues apace. So you'll be able to buy a 200TB disk for £100. Or 50TB for £100 and it will be same size as a CF card. Or something like that.
 
Having seen how fast memory capacity has grown over the past 40 or so years, I wonder how long it'll be before we see Petabyte drives and then Exabyte. In the great scheme of things, it's not that long ago that 64kB was state of the art for home computers!
 
I have to say I cant wait for big SSDs to get realy cheap and ditch the spinners in my microserver
 
I remember when I was cool (I was once, honest) as I had 16MB of RAM, and a 40MB HDD in the PC that I built..... It's hard to believe that my son who is now 30, can't remember life without the Internet. The last 50 years has seen so much change in terms of technology....
 
Way back in the 1970's I worked on one of the largest System/360 IBM Mainframes in Europe. It occupied a huge machine hall & had 4mbytes of memory, we had a 'spare' 1mb memory frame in the back of the machine hall. It was approx 2m high, 2m long and 0.33m wide & was on castors to slot into the CPU frame. You could see the individual ferrite magnetic cores, (each represented a 'bit') along with the wires that caused them to switch & and sense their state (+/-).

The system ran from a fixed head file or drum storage device with a capacity of 10mbytes.

I later worked for IBM (almost 30 years) supporting their mainframe products until I took early retirement which lasted less than a year before I got bored & I ended up running a school network for a further 12 years.
 
I spent time working on the original Televideo PM file servers - biggest hard drive they supported was 70MB and many of the customers I visited ran entire companies on one of those servers.
I have single TIFF files bigger than that........
 
Talking of hard drives, a bioscience company I worked for in the mid 90s set up their own network with a HDD providing file serving in the office just off the communal office space. One could hear it (almost feel it through the floor) when the head was searching, making a low-pitched doof, d-d-doof, d-doof sound that carried probably 30 feet. In the back on my mind I recall the drive was made by Maxtor, but I'm really not sure.
 
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