20 Dec
2004
20 Dec
'04
10:52 a.m.
Actually in 1975 or 1976 one of my fellow graduate students, moving to
Beaverton Oregon to work for Tektronix, was trying to move some early
disk drives and was asked by the movers what they were. Home
furnishings were readily moveable but not office stuff. So he put them
in washer and dryer boxes and the movers were happy to move them. They
had been used as end tables in his living room up until them.
He also built the first Altair I ever saw.
Andy said
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)
Mike