"and made of metal (as are all hard drive platters)"

This is not entirely accurate. Some harddrive platters are made of glass.

I stand corrected.
I learn something new every day on this site.

Remember the IBM Deskstar "Deathstar" drives they had glass platters I think, when they head crashed (and they did) you could open them up and see through the platters as the media layer was usually scrapped off. Never got to see one for myself so I'm going on anecdotal stories here.

After a little research, I learned they could also be made of ceramic. Fascinating!

When I started at NIST the last of the old Winchesters were going out the door.

We relied on the PDP-11s and these drives until sometime in the early 1990s. I forget exactly when we retired them.

I used to have a platter from a DEC disk pack on my bedroom wall!

Something like that would make a nice Digital face for an analog clock.

That is just lovely~ I'm more of a magnetic tape guy on my end :P

Well, I submitted those cartridges too. Actually, I have a few other magnetic tape examples in my own collection that I could dig out...

There was a time when you could walk around inside most computers..they required dedicated 3-phase circuits, cost millions of dollars, were the size of two-story houses, and had almost as much computing power as the average toaster.

True. I do take comfort in the knowledge that there are a FEW computers which are older than I am.

I remember one of my old boss's uni friends had one of the really big platters that he turned into a coffee table XD
I love this sort of thing old vs new.

Now THAT's impressive. I wonder what company manufactured a drive that huge.

I don't remember if he mentioned a brand but I do remember it was out of a "fixed head" drive and took 15minutes to spin up. The arm had heads all along it and was in a fixed position :D

And now you have TERABITES on one small platter, maybe two, inside a 2.5 inch drive spinning 10K - 15K RPM's

It’s amazing how the technology has advanced in my short career!
Thanks for the fave, BTW.

Whoah! Cool stuff here! Shows, how the technology progressed. My earliest memories are of 5,25 and 8" floppies and HDD-s with capacities counted in MB, but that's all. Only heard about disk packs, but never seen one IRL. Luckily, for those, like me, born too late, there are ways to grasp the idea of how the real computers looked like One can even see it on a computer thanks to the magicks of modern technology: http://www.tnmoc.org/news/news-rele.....our-now-online (virtual tour of british National Museum of Computing)

Not many people remember 8-inch floppies. We didn't have an 8-inch drive, but a computer down in our Acoustics Lab (I believe) did. I do remember somebody from that area showing me a disk for it once.

Thank you so much for the link. If I ever make it to the U.K. that museum will be on my list of places to visit.

In 1983 when I was a wee tot, my father worked for DEC at the Vermont Manufacturing Plant. I remember quite vividly in my parents bedroom was a data rack with a green screen VT220, a 3600 baud modem and one of those washing machine disk drives. Every night my dad would come home, load that thing in and boy did it make quite some interesting whooshing and whirring noises.

He was a power systems engineer and often did a lot of 'work from home' simply because when you work for the company like he did, you had access to all the toys. When I spoke to the other kids at school about how I 'played chess over the phone line with the mainframe at my dad's work' well... it was like I was speaking an alien language. Most of them barely had a notion of what an Atari was let alone Hayes commands or line noise or ANSI.

But, at any rate, yeah, I was 'online with mainframe access, a 64mb disk drive and a terminal' in 1983. I've not seen one of these disk packs since then.

Thanks for the memory.

As a side note, the tech startup I'm with is in the process of designing some removable cards, so as a homage to the PDP series, I've resurrected and copied the classic pull handle on the flip chip, and have incorporated it into the design. If the product gets funding, I'm sure more than a few in the industry will get quite a kick out of seeing it :}

How cool that your dad worked for DEC. When I began my job at Cessna in 1983, the VT-100 was their state-of-the art terminal, but as a lowly operator, I had to work using an LA-120 hard copy terminal. Then the VT-200 series came along. By then I was writing software and I got to develop graphics applications for a VT-240.

Your story about paying homage to the flip chip handle made my day.