Think all the early pre-IBM PC hard drives were 5-10MB tops? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 03, 2018, 03:13:17 pm
content: Came across this issue of Byte while reading about a different vintage computing subject, with this ad from Ohio Scientific - 74MB hard drive! Yours for only $6k Yankee Bucks in 1977.https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1977-11/page/n43Couple pages previously is a funny for EE geeks cartoon, couple of transistors taking about a third one "I may be biased, but he looks a little saturated"Oh and on the next page after this is a first look at the TRS-80 Model 1. Interesting to note are the pre-production floppy drives, with odd looking cases and shown being 'used' without the Expansion Interface.

author: In Vacuo Veritas
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: December 03, 2018, 03:18:46 pm
content: Why would anyone think that?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1360Mainframe and minis had disk packs with much more than 10MB storage.

author: rrinker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 03, 2018, 05:13:01 pm
content: Yes - mainframes. But we're talking 8 bit micros here.Even years later, a hard drive for a typical 8 bit machine was 5, 10, or 15 MB, as far as 'commonly available'. Still have the manuals for the TRS-80 5MB HDD, though I never actually had one on my machine. Even the PC XT, 20MB. My first HDD was an RLL version for a whopping 32MB.

author: kizmit99
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: December 03, 2018, 08:02:54 pm
content: Quote from: rrinker on December 03, 2018, 03:13:17 pmActually it looks like one of those "floppies" is the expansion interface...

author: ebastler
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 03, 2018, 10:04:19 pm
content: Quote from: rrinker on December 03, 2018, 03:13:17 pmAnd the first-ever edition of "Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar" on page 10 (of the magazine, not the PDF). Plus an article on Sweet16 on page 150, by a guy named Steve Wozniak. A nice issue of BYTE, thank you!

author: Ampera
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 05:21:45 am
content: All isn't an appropriate descriptor. If there was money for it in 1970, you could get whatever size companies like IBM had the technology to build.If you're talking about what's commonly available, hard drives weren't commonly available at all for home/hobbyist computing kits before the 5150, which didn't even ship at launch with a hard drive, despite it being a high end business-oriented machine. If you really needed to store data on your local computer on a hard disk, for some reason, you could get whatever size you could afford, pretty much. As was previously said, mainframe machines definitely had over 10MB drives available in the late 70's.When the IBM PC/XT came out, it shipped with a 10MB MFM hard disk, with drive sizes increasing throughout the 1980's, but even until PCs really entered into the home in the late 80's, I'd imagine you'd still find people with their C64s, Atari 400/800s, or even Amiga/STs without any sort of hard disk storage whatsoever.Hard drives initially made sense for random access storage that was cheaper than just a load of ferrite core memory in a box, but not something like a tape drive, which has issues with getting to a specific bit of data in a fast time (which might be important if you're a bank doing transactions).So home use really didn't need hard disks until prices dropped significantly, and floppy disks weren't enough to store most/all of what you did on a computer.

author: Towger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 05, 2018, 05:41:05 am
content: Those were the days. We had a sales man (RIP) who lived though it all. He would tell stories of selling HD upgrades to customers, doubling their capacity to ?20MB. It was just a matter of changing a few jumpers in the unit. The engineer would be sent to the customer with strict instructions to take all day on job. The customer would we happy they bought an upgradeable system. Saving money. And he was happy with his commission from the £30k the upgrade cost.

author: duak
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: December 06, 2018, 12:16:45 am
content: I got an 8", 5 Mbyte Shugart with SASI controller for my home computer in late 1980. Got it running CP/M over the holiday break. It had two problems: one of the digital chips on the controller was sensitive to temperature. The second was that there were soft errors on the inner cylinders caused when the controller was mounted on the drive. It was a lot faster than floppies and, for that time, had virtually limitless storage.The first big disk I worked with was a 300 MB wini that emulated some DEC device way back in 1983. I think it might have been an 8" CDC with an Emulex interface board. The computer was a DEC LSI-11 running RT-11. RT-11 couldn't handle logical drives bigger than 32 Mbyte so the physical drive was divided into a number of smaller logical drives. RT-11 allocated file data blocks sequentially - there was no FAT or inode table. Unfortunately, there was at least one bad block in each logical drive so the maximum length of a file varied between the logical drives. I started working on modifications to the disk driver to not just mark the bad block out, but skip over it so the files could be lengthened. We were stuck with RT-11 because it was the fastest and most efficient OS for the LSI-11. CP/M wouldn't have had this problem as it allocated blocks randomly.

author: Rick Law
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 12, 2019, 06:01:44 am
content: Quote from: Ampera on December 05, 2018, 05:21:45 amAudio cassette storage was common for C64, Atari, etc. For the more serious users, floppies.I recall the big jump occur when IBM introduced the PS/2 - introduced with 120mb (model 50) 200mb (model 70)hdd when the AT and compatibles were 10-20mb. At the time, I thought 200mb with the Model 70 was so over the top - who would have so much to store on a PC, I thought...EDIT - Adding this interesting side-note (about storage during late IBM AT / early IBM PS/2 time):I was at my then girl-friend's office (now she is my wife). She was xeroxing some paper work. One page fell and I pick it up. It was for a 1gb disk drive for a client on a UNIX machine: $45,000! That was before adding installation charges.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 12, 2019, 09:17:37 am
content: My dad bought one of the early IBM PCs, it came with no hard drive but some time later he added a 20MB drive on a card that plugged into a slot, seems like that was about a $1500 upgrade in the early 80s. Up into the late 80s I still knew people with C64s, Atari 800, Mac Plus that had no hard drive at all. Even people who had hard drives back then typically had a lot of programs and data stored on floppies.

author: rbm
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 12, 2019, 09:54:09 am
content: Yes, the first drives supplied in the IBM PCs in 1980's were 5" full-height 10MB, standard off-the-shelf Seagate ST506 units.I joined IBM in 1978 and worked in Quality Assurance in the Toronto plant where PCs were assembled. We were responsible for selecting random samples from the assembly line, and testing for lifetime and early life failures. I built the test jigs for housing drives that were exercised for various functions (seq. and random seek, R/W, etc.) at full operating temperature extremes. Failed drives were dissected to determine the failure mode and information was fed back to the drive manufacturer for improvements. Great job for an engineer straight out of school.

author: jmelson
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2019, 08:12:13 pm
content: I got a 10 MB 2-platter Winchester drive from Memorex in about 1980. It was through an ad in one of the electronics magazines, drive and SASI controller for $1600.Certainly a no-brainer. I built a simple byte-wide parallel interface to the SASI bus, and wrote a driver for my Z-80 CP/M system. Nobody else I knew had a hard drive on their home computer for a LONG time after that.Jon

author: Heartbreaker
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 14, 2019, 10:13:14 am
content: Quote from: james_s on February 12, 2019, 09:17:37 amThat brings back some old memories, I have forgotten all about hardcards. The hybrid solution that combined a HDD and a (ISA) controller as one assembly that could be inserted into an expansion slot.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 14, 2019, 09:32:11 pm
content: I think the one my dad had was a Western Digital, it was more clunky than the sleek Hardcard units but the PC had only 5 slots so the drive could hang over into dead space.

author: Stray Electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2019, 12:15:34 am
content: Quote from: rbm on February 12, 2019, 09:54:09 amI still have three of the ST-506 drives that are NIB. I found them about ten years after they were obseleted but I thought that they were too historic to simply be thrown out so I bought them and stored them away. One of these days I think that I'll get them out and see if they still work. Assuming that I still have a controller card (I think I do.) My first hard drive in a PC was a then brand new technology 32Mb RLL drive. The drive itself was a standard Seagate 20 MB (ST-225 I think) but the RLL encoding allowed it to store a whopping 32Mb of data. After using 360k floppies it seemed like an infinity of drive space. I installed very piece of software that I then owned and still had about 29Mb free. I sold that computer with the drive years later and I never did come close to filling it up.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2019, 01:14:45 am
content: That's pretty cool! NOS ST-506 drives are a rare thing these days, I bet a lot of collectors would love to find something like that.

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2019, 02:03:29 am
content: Does anybody know the background for the HD moniker “Winchester”?Someone had explained it too me many, many moons ago. It was somehow related to the caliber of the famous rifle, but can’t remember the complete story.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 15, 2019, 03:42:45 am
content: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_3340The significance of a particular code name of IBM DASD was its ability to land the head on the disk surface when it spun down. Contemporary drives had emergency head retract devices to prevent the heads from crashing when they lost lift force. This was universally adopted in later models, and is the reason the IBM PC BIOS has a Landing Zone Cylinder (LZ) parameter.

author: darrellg
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 15, 2019, 06:22:48 pm
content: Quote from: schmitt trigger on February 15, 2019, 02:03:29 amFromhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_IBM_magnetic_disk_drives#IBM_3340:Quote

author: Alex Eisenhut
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 19, 2019, 04:18:25 am
content: Quote from: Ampera on December 05, 2018, 05:21:45 amI was in high school at the time, and simply adding a 3.5" floppy to my C64 system was like a hard disk... 880K on a disk? Madness!Although flipping through the magazines of the time I'd often see ads for things like the bizarre SFD-1001, a one megabyte 5.25" IEEE drive, or the monstrous 9060 hard drivehttp://www.mos6502.com/friday-commodore/strange-peripherals-commodore-hard-drives/or the exotic Lt Kernalhttp://www.mos6502.com/friday-commodore/strange-peripherals-the-lt-kernal-hard-drive/all wayyy out of reach, both price-wise and physically, none of these things were in a local store as far as I knew when I was a kid...My first Amiga, a 1000, was a strictly dual floppy affair. Only on my 2000 did I get a hard disk, an exciting time!

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 19, 2019, 04:35:41 am
content: I remember in the mid 90s seeing an ad for a 1GB 5.25" FH SCSI hard drive for around $1300 and thinking how awesome it would be to have a whole gigabyte of space. I could install every game I'd ever want!Now you can get several times that on a micro SD card for 10 bucks.

author: Nusa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 19, 2019, 09:49:16 am
content: Back about 1976, I was doing stuff with a TI-980 minicomputer that had an IBM 2315 disk cartridge that held about 1 MB. The cold-boot procedure was to toggle in about a 20 word program that read the paper tape reader attached to the TTY. The paper tape loop loaded a program that read the first sector on the disk, which in turn loaded a simple operating system that gave you a TTY console to work with. Anything that was important enough to back up for reuse was printed on paper tape.This was a university setting, not industrial, so the programs weren't that important in most cases. It was about the learning.

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 08, 2019, 09:38:52 am
content: Quote from: james_s on February 19, 2019, 04:35:41 amI had one.Around 1996, as I was finishing my degree, my desktop computer was an Acorn A5000. It had a 25 MHz ARM processor, 4 MB of RAM, and an internal IDE hard disc of 120 MB (which was generall reckoned to be plenty big enough at the time).A friend of mine had been working at a company which did video rendering for movies. They obviously had a need for as much storage as was commercially viable, and they'd been using an array of 1.2GB SCSI drives as a frame store. They'd recently upgraded (to 9 GB drives, IIRC) and were selling off the old drives.This thing was as big as a shoe box, and it needed a case and power supply. The cheapest way I could find to do this was to buy a PC case and install it there, with the SCSI cables poking out the back. Powering it up sounded like a jet aircraft taking off.To make it work I also had to buy a SCSI interface, which came with a driver (in ROM, of course) that could handle large drives by partitioning them into chunks of the maximum supported size of 512 MB. I ended up with three logical SCSI drives, two 512 MB and one 256 MB, plus the original 120 MB internal drive.Bulky? Yes. Noisy? Sure! But *so* much storage, especially on a platform where bloatware didn't exist, the OS was on ROM, and most software was delivered on 800k floppy discs.I never filled it. Not even close!

author: Rasz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 08, 2019, 03:58:21 pm
content: Quote from: AndyC_772 on March 08, 2019, 09:38:52 amyou sure you didnt mean ~1989-92?in 1996 standard boring PCs came with Pentium 100-200MHz, 8-16MB ram and 1GB drivesand thats eastern europehttp://www.wykop.pl/ramka/3682653/gazetka-vobis-z-1-wrzesnia-1996-roku/

author: ebastler
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 08, 2019, 04:33:53 pm
content: Quote from: Rasz on March 08, 2019, 03:58:21 pmWell, AndyC did not mention how long he had already owned that computer in 1996!Also, you misquoted him: The "bulky, noisy, so much storage" comment was referring to a 1.2GB SCSI drive which he added to that machine in 1996.

author: Rasz
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 08, 2019, 04:57:29 pm
content: Quote from: ebastler on March 08, 2019, 04:33:53 pmThats what I meant to underline with my quote, in 1996 brand new standard PC HDD was quiet and cool ~1GB 3.5 IDE at ~$200Building PC case sized loud contraption was highly un-optimal to say the least. In 1992 tho it would be around $2000 for 1GB SCSI drive.

author: AndyC_772
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 08, 2019, 09:16:55 pm
content: Geez, either read the story and enjoy it, or ignore it and move on.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 09, 2019, 02:01:04 am
content: I finally got one of those drives around then too, must have been around 1996, the place where my friend's brother worked was cleaning out a storage room and disposing of a bunch of old computer gear so naturally I was happy to help out. I put it in a Gateway 486-66 that came from the same haul and stuck that under my brother's bed to use as a server. Yeah modern drives for a couple hundred bucks would have held as much, but I was a broke teenager living with a single parent, a couple hundred bucks was about what I could scrape together in a year at the time. I made due with what I could get for free. The education I got by screwing around with all that old stuff was priceless though.

author: schmitt trigger
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: March 12, 2019, 01:50:49 pm
content: "The education I got by screwing around with all that old stuff was priceless though."It is actually the best technical education a curious young man can have.I did not screw with computers, but radios and amplifiers. Tubed ones.

author: rambobrite
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: March 23, 2019, 12:01:46 am
content: I had one of the TRS-80 "five meg disk subsystems" for my Model I. I kind of miss having a key-based power switch, and a big bright write-protect button. But not the jet-engine sound of it spinning up.

author: Sam Hobbs
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 02, 2019, 01:47:18 am
content: The title is confusing for me. Is it referring to pre-release IBM PCs? That is confusing for me since the first IBM PCs did not have hard drives (not even soft drives). If it is referring to computers prior to the IBM PC then that is confusing because I did not hear the termPersonal Computerbefore the IBM PC; the common terms were things like micro-computer. I think you are referring to micro-computers but it took me a while to decide that.

author: Sam Hobbs
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 02, 2019, 03:02:31 am
content: Quote from: schmitt trigger on February 15, 2019, 02:03:29 amI will first tell you what I remember being told. What I remember is that Winchester is a technology and the primary feature of the technology is that the platters and the heads are all contained in an air-tight unit. Prior to Winchester technology the platters were separate and removable. (One of the tasks I performed in the Army in 1976 was to load up spindles into my car and take them from the Pentagon to a Naval station to get them degaussed.) Prior to Winchester technology the platters and heads were very sensitive; just smoke from a cigarette could damage them.Now if you try to find that in the Wikipedia then you will get a different story. One article implies that the name originally was a code name for just one model of IBM drive.The explanation for why the name Winchester was chosen is also not clear (from the Wikipedia at least). One explanation is that it is the name of a street. However the name of the street is related to Winchester rifles so rifles seem related even if it was indirect.

author: Sam Hobbs
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 02, 2019, 03:07:01 am
content: Quote from: helius on February 15, 2019, 03:42:45 amActually the retraction feature was a spring. When power was off the spring would pull the heads back. Without a spring the heads needed to beparkedexplicitly. The XT and AT PCs had a BIOS capability to park the heads. If the heads were not parked explicitly then the heads and platters were very vulnerable.

author: Sam Hobbs
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: August 02, 2019, 03:09:10 am
content: Quote from: darrellg on February 15, 2019, 06:22:48 pmSorry for my previous post but the Wikipedia is not so clear ion other places.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: August 07, 2019, 09:41:46 pm
content: You can edit your posts if you need to add anything; that's far better than posting four times in a row.