When PCs first came out, there were no affordable hard drives. Even when the IBM PC was introduced in 1981, it had only a 160 kilobyte floppy drive. The first mass market PC with a built-in hard drive was the IBM XT, which came out in 1983, with a whopping 10 megabytes of storage.
The original 160 KB floppy could store about 164,000 bytes or characters – enough for about 137 pages of double spaced text. Forget about graphics, music or video. That 10 megabyte drive back in 1983 could store about 8,800 pages of text.
While it took until the 1980s for hard drives to migrate down to PCs, they were actually invented back in the 1950s. The first hard drive used in a commercial computer was unveiled by IBM 50 years ago this week on September 13, 1956.
That first drive assembly, called the "IBM 350 disc storage unit" was part of the IBM 305 RAMAC computer, according to Craig Butler, IBM's manager of disc storage products.
The device, according to Butler, made it possible for businesses to access data on a random basis without having to predefine the order of access - similar to the way you would locate a song on a cassette tape.
The storage process was called "continuous accounting" because it allowed users – that is, businesses who could afford it - to process data right after it was loaded into the computer.
The device, which stored five million characters (a bit short of 5 megabytes), cost $35,000 in 1956 dollars and stood 5 feet tall, a little less than 6 feet wide and 2.5 feet deep.
Nothing beats the floppy power of the Commodore 1541 drive! However, when it comes to old school HDs, MFM or RLL for the win!
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