happy birthday hard disc drive
Happy birthday, hard disk drive John Naughton THE HARD disk is 50 years old this month. On September 13, 1956, IBM unveiled its IBM 305 Ramac computer, whose major selling point was that it had something called a "disk drive": the 350 Disk File unit. Up to then, data had been stored either on magnetic drums or on tape, either of which made accessing files a painfully slow process. The 350 Disk File offered a blessed release from this torment. It consisted of a rack of 50 24-inch, magnetically coated platters mounted on a single vertical spindle and rotating at high speed. In between the platters, and looking rather like a giant animated hair-comb, was an assembly of read-write heads that clacked in and out, reading or writing data from and to the disks and passing the information to and from the machine's processor. The drive was the size of two large refrigerators, and was leased to customers at an annual rental of $35,000, which, according to my calculations, would be about $250,000 in today's money. But corporate customers thought it a bargain because it meant that their (very expensive) mainframe computers were suddenly more versatile as well as faster. A digital computer works by taking data from a permanent storage medium, carrying out operations on that data, and then writing the results back into storage. The slowest part of this process was getting stuff out of, and into, storage, and hard disks offered a way of easing the bottleneck. The result: more data, processed faster. IBM's colossal spinning plate-rack held a grand total of 4.4 megabytes of data, which is not quite enough space to store the copy of Eric Clapton's Lonely Stranger that I carry around on my iPod. The hard disk in the iPod is just 1.8 inches in diameter, and yet it can store 60 gigabytes of data, which is almost 14,000 times the capacity of the 350 Disk File. The drive in my laptop is 2.5 inches in diameter and has a capacity of 120 gigabytes. Next year's model will doubtless hold 200 gigabytes. And so it goes on. At one level, the story of the hard disk industry is a metaphor for the development of the entire computer industry: double the performance for half the price with every passing year. Fascinating though it is in business terms, the breakneck evolution of hard drive technology is actually the least interesting part of the story. Far more significant is what that technology has made possible. It has effectively reduced the cost of storing data so close to zero as to make no difference. That is why Google can offer two gigabytes of free personal data storage to anyone who signs up for Gmail. Without cheap and boundless mass storage, companies such as Google, Amazon, and eBay couldn't exist, and services such as Apple's iTunes, Wikipedia, and the Internet Archive would be unthinkable. As with all technologies, there is a darker side to the storage revolution triggered by IBM in 1956. For example, it is what enables the National Security Agency, if it chooses to do so, to store on its servers a copy of every email ever dispatched by a U.S. citizen. It enables phone companies to store detailed records of every phone call you make in your lifetime, and turns national DNA and ID-card databases into feasible propositions. No matter how one views the impact of hard disk technology, one thing is unarguable: it's been given a raw deal by history. The story of computing has hitherto been told almost entirely in terms of advances in processors and networks. But the truth is that nothing that we take for granted today would be possible without the vast, fast, cheap mass storage provided by hard disks. - C Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006 Shadab Husain Mo: 9335206224 To unsubscribe send a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
