1956 IBM 5MB hard disk drive - photos

[Altair]

1956 IBM 5 megabyte hard disk drive.






Previously:

Installing 2 petabytes of storage - GIF
Smartphone hard disk drive - GIF
4.5 megabytes of data represented by punch cards - photo
1970s hard disk drive advertisement - photo
Zooming in on a compact disc - GIF

[hemmjo]

Isn't that crazy!!!! Now you can get 1TB on a microSD card. That is 200,000 times more than that hard drive.

[neilbourjaily]

50 years ago I drove truck delivering similar pieces for HP from their Gaithersburg, MD (a rural town, then) facility to Emery Air Freight (before Fed Ex) at DCA. I don't recall their megabyte capacity, but the guys at HP were terrific and as home spun as you could want.

[NeiljohnUK]

Er, no that's NOT a hard disc, that's a drum store.

The lower photo shows the drum clearly, and the moving head bar that translated the multiple heads up and down the few inches required to read/write over the whole of the drums surface. The heads however were often part of the explosive drum failure mode these things suffered from, as the cast iron drum would break up if a head came loose and scored the drum, or worse jammed hard into it. When built Fawley power station had these for the computers, all discrete component machines of that time, one of the drum stores exploded and wrecked most of the computer it served, with chunks of the drum still embedded in the computer room walls when the station was demolished, needless to say no-one was allowed beyond the newly installed blast doors whilst the computers were running after that. When IBM delivered newly developed 5Mb 'Winchester' disc-drives, developed at IBM Hursley, near Winchester, to the station the drum stores thankfully became redundant and we were allowed into the computer rooms to swap boards again, that was in the late 70's. When I worked as a "your only a f'king contractor" for IBM in the 90's they were still manufacturing those long obsolete 5Mb drives as they were contractually obliged to support or replace them for 50 years!