18 Dec
2004
18 Dec
'04
4:04 a.m.
Smallest in size, or in capacity? My first hard drive
was a
Shugart 5 meg drive, MFM encoding. Was there ever a smaller hard
drive by capacity for the 'PeeCee' or otherwise? 5 megs was a
LOT of space at the time.
Probably nothing of smaller capacity in modern days, but much smaller ones
used to exist .... ask PDP8 people about the df32 disk :-)
My experience of early hard disks was with the ICT EDS-4 which stored 4M
6-bit characters (ie about 3 MB) - the (exchangeable) disk pack was close to
the size of a complete PC ... the drives were referred to as "washing
machines" because of their size and appearance.
(and the controller was about the same size also).
The IBM equivalent was, I think, the 1311 ... the 2311 being equivalent to
the ICT EDS-8 (which had twice as many tracks as the eds4 but was otherwise
identical)
Then our PDP11 had an RK05 which was of similar capacity but somewhat more
compact.
All these are pre "Winchester" (3030) technology
Andy
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