How old were you 1987?
I was 16 years old and I had my Commodore 64 with a 1541 floppy disk and 170 kilobytes was a big storage for me, a guy used to cassette tapes to store computer data.
In real business, hard disks already carried hundreds of megabytes and were big - yes big. One of these "disks" was brought in by my esteemed collegue who got it from a bank some years ago where these platters ran for 12 years without any problems.
I was 16 years old and I had my Commodore 64 with a 1541 floppy disk and 170 kilobytes was a big storage for me, a guy used to cassette tapes to store computer data.In real business, hard disks already carried hundreds of megabytes and were big - yes big. One of these "disks" was brought in by my esteemed collegue who got it from a bank some years ago where these platters ran for 12 years without any problems.
I took some pictures of this machine and I am pleased to show them to you.
Manufacturing date is 1987, the "mod I" had 200 Megabytes, but this is a "mod II", I think it had 300 Megabytes.
This hard disk can now be visited at the computing center of the University of Konstanz, central hall in building V, 5th floor.
Manufacturing date is 1987, the "mod I" had 200 Megabytes, but this is a "mod II", I think it had 300 Megabytes.
This hard disk can now be visited at the computing center of the University of Konstanz, central hall in building V, 5th floor.
You may click to enlarge pictures, their width or height is always 800 pixels. Larger pictures are available on request.
Side view.Note the blue motor. It spun at 3450 rpm and the platters were driven by a belt like in an old turntable.
The drive electronics had to be cooled by a big fan.
This disk did not have an included controller! It had to be connected to an IBM controller card for their mainframe line of AS/400 systems.
Close-Up to the visible heads of the first platter. You'll notice that there were two heads per side to double data transfer rate (two tracks are read/written at once).
There are four platters in this machine with 4 heads each.
The back of the disk.
The little hard disk is a 80 GB 2,5 inch disk, just to give a size comparison.
The drive electronics had to be cooled by a big fan.
This disk did not have an included controller! It had to be connected to an IBM controller card for their mainframe line of AS/400 systems.
Close-Up to the visible heads of the first platter. You'll notice that there were two heads per side to double data transfer rate (two tracks are read/written at once).There are four platters in this machine with 4 heads each.The back of the disk.The little hard disk is a 80 GB 2,5 inch disk, just to give a size comparison.
In 1987 I was nothing but a bad dream in my parents' heads.
Cool drive though, looks like a power tool. A saw. :D
I have one of these in my garage. It would be pretty cool to connect it to something and get it working. I wonder if anyone has enough technical info to achieve that.
Hi Mark, I am wondering if the drive is for sale... Please drop me a line at vojta at kavan biz. Thanks!
Yes i have one for sale
contact me if you are interesting