On 12/4/2014 1:05 AM, Peter Blodow wrote: > At the company I was working for, I had a building management system > installed (don't want to mention the brand, sounded like Siemens) around > 1980. The central processor unit contained a hard disk drive with a - > nowadays - ridiculous sounding capacity of, say, 100 kbyte. There was > one aluminium disk of about 30 cm diameter inside, we could see it > turning through the plexiglas cover. The device was the size of a large > drawer, weighing about 50 kg, and ran continously without failure (and > without back up system) up until we switched it all off to make room for > a more modern system. The disk made it more than 30 years without > repairs. The new system is PC based and the computers must be replaced > about every two or three years.
My maternal grandparents lived in their last home for nearly 60 years. There was an Amana upright freezer in the basement when they moved in. The thing had walls and a door nearly a foot thick, shaped pretty much like a bank vault. The lining was made of galvanized steel and some type of thick, black plastic sheet, all screwed together with a vaguely art-deco styled exterior. The only times it was ever off was when the power was out. We pulled the plug after my grandfather passed away. I dunno if it's being used by the current owners of the house. Applying current MTBF evaluation to that freezer would likely qualify as infinity. A few years ago I saw a curious thing at an auction. An IBM tape cartridge storage system comprised of several units the size of a clothes washer plus a controller unit the size of a couple of large upright freezers. Total combined capacity? About 8 gigabytes! That was right about the time the first 8 gig USB thumb drives hit the market. The system got no bids, not even from any of the scrap buyers. Some time before that, I was at a scrap yard, 'scuse me, Recycling Center, and came across this massive set of steel cabinetry. About half the volume of each was filled with power supplies and cooling fans. The rest was row upon row of empty slots for something. Then I went into the building and saw a large stack of hard drives. 9 gig each. Unfortunately they had some funky proprietary connector so were useless for the classic Macintosh collection I had. (Weren't even SCA80 and this was before SATA. Something IBM invented to lock customers into buying only IBM drives.) I went back out to the cabinets, counted slots and did a bit of multiplication. I was staring at the gutted remains of a one terabyte RAID array. The first 500 gigabyte hard drives had just been introduced. Amazing to think that for a street price of around $1K a person could hold in one hand the same amount of data that only a few years before required that multi-ton, several million $ multi-kilowatt sucking behemoth - and that pair of drives would be far more reliable. --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. http://www.avast.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=164703151&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
