Hello, again

[davehc]

My first (on a pc) was 20mbs. It had a spreadsheet, wordprocessor, and a Dbase, as well as a couple of other small programs. Believe it or not, that was the computer where I had my first virus, obtained of apirated piece of software. Quit harmless, it just popped up with a message at the start, with the author proudly announcing hat he had "hacked" you computer. (Which, of course, he had not, really!)

 

[Kalario]

During my college years I worked at a small software company that used to run payroll for a couple of small businesses, the programs were written in COBOL and it used to take 8-10 hours to run. We had to change these disks (see picture in my earlier post) every few hours. I had the graveyard shift monitoring that the process runs smoothly.

ahhh...the good old days !!!

 

[Nibiru2012]

Is that what hard drives really looked like in those days? And a 256MB at that?

From Wikipedia:

HDDs (introduced in 1956 as data storage for an IBM accounting computer)[7] were originally developed for use with general purpose computers.

1950s - 1970s

Main article: early IBM disk storage
The IBM 350 Disk File, invented by Reynold Johnson, was introduced in 1956 with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer. This drive had fifty 24 inch platters, with a total capacity of five million characters. A single head assembly having two heads was used for access to all the platters, making the average access time very slow (just under 1 second).

The IBM 1301 Disk Storage Unit,[3] announced in 1961, introduced the usage of a head for each data surface with the heads having self acting air bearings (flying heads).

Also in 1961, Bryant Computer Products introduced its 4000 series disk drives. These massive units stood 52 inches (1.3 m) tall, 70 inches (1.8 m) wide, and had up to 26 platters, each 39 inches (0.99 m) in diameter, rotating at up to 1200 rpm. Access times were from 50 to 205 ms. The drive's total capacity, depending on the number of platters installed, was up to 205,377,600 bytes, or 196 MiB.[4][5]

The first disk drive to use removable media was the IBM 1311 drive, which used the IBM 1316 disk pack to store two million characters.

In 1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3340 "Winchester" disk drive, the first significant commercial use of low mass and low load heads with lubricated media. All modern disk drives now use this technology and/or derivatives thereof. Project head designer/lead designer Kenneth Haughton named it after the Winchester 30-30 rifle after the developers called it the "30-30" because of it was planned to have two 30 MB spindles; however, the actual product shipped with two spindles for data modules of either 35 MB or 70 MB.[6]

 

[BetaMan]

That is unbelievably awesome. Hey everyone (jumping up to the early new century and late 90s), remember the IBM DeskStar? Nicknamed the IBM DeathStar, of course. I've got one sitting in my garage. 20GB. Still works, amazingly.