by Tdarcos » Mon Jan 30, 2023 12:16 am
You think a 5 1/2" double-height drive with "only" 6 GB in it is a huge drive with very little capacity, I have a story for you.
The main computer for the City College I went to was a Univac 90/60 mainframe, with a very large hard drive. About the size and shape of a washing machine, the drive supported removable packs, about 2' tall and the diameter of a dinner plate, they held, get this, 100 megabytes. And we supported the entire school and all the programming classes on this one machine with four of these drives and 512K of real memory. K, not Meg, or GB. And we supported about 20 simultaneous terminal users and about 400 using punch cards.
And I have my story, titled "Nice Work If You Can Get It."
After IBM, back in the 1970s, the second largest computer company was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC was generally considered expensive; more than one customer was known to say, "I'd love to have an all-DEC shop," (all the terminals, disks, and peripherals DEC-branded), "but I can't afford it."
DEC's hard drive was similar to the one above, i.e. washing machine sized, with removable packs the circumference of dinner plates, and 2' tall. The drive cost $27,000 in 1976 dollars (about $140,835.13 today). It may have come with one removable 100 MB pack; extra packs cost $700 each (about $3,651.28 today). While DEC did make good, reliable drives, the best manufacturer of drives in the world was Control Data Corporation. They also made a washing machine-sized hard drive which supported removable 100MB packs. The disk packs cost the same, $700, but Control Data's drives were $7,000 (about $36,512.81 today). You could use them on a DEC computer, you just needed an adapter card which cost $300 (about $1,564.83 today).
At one DEC shop, the system administrator got permission to add two drives. One was a brand-new DEC drive, the other was a CDC drive with adapter card (DEC drives didn't need one). Since he had to open the drives up to install them, he decided to find out why DEC's drives were so much more expensive. He installed the card in the CDC, and checked the connections. When looking over the DEC drive, he realized part of the extra cost was that the DEC drive has a built-in controller card. DEC makes smart drives that do all the translation work; CDC makes stupid drives where the computer does the disk location conversion work, thus the reason for the controller card.
After inspecting both drives carefully, he discovered the difference. The card, that's all. DEC was actually buying CDC drives, adding their own built-in proprietary interface card, putting their own housing on them, then rebadging them as DEC drives, and charging about $20,000 more for the DEC logo.
You think a 5 1/2" double-height drive with "only" 6 GB in it is a huge drive with very little capacity, I have a story for you.
The main computer for the City College I went to was a Univac 90/60 mainframe, with a very large hard drive. About the size and shape of a washing machine, the drive supported removable packs, about 2' tall and the diameter of a dinner plate, they held, get this, 100 megabytes. And we supported the entire school and all the programming classes on this one machine with four of these drives and 512K of real memory. K, not Meg, or GB. And we supported about 20 simultaneous terminal users and about 400 using punch cards.
And I have my story, titled "Nice Work If You Can Get It."
After IBM, back in the 1970s, the second largest computer company was Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). DEC was generally considered expensive; more than one customer was known to say, "I'd love to have an all-DEC shop," (all the terminals, disks, and peripherals DEC-branded), "but [i]I can't afford it.[/i]"
DEC's hard drive was similar to the one above, i.e. washing machine sized, with removable packs the circumference of dinner plates, and 2' tall. The drive cost $27,000 in 1976 dollars (about $140,835.13 today). It may have come with one removable 100 MB pack; extra packs cost $700 each (about $3,651.28 today). While DEC did make good, reliable drives, the best manufacturer of drives in the world was Control Data Corporation. They also made a washing machine-sized hard drive which supported removable 100MB packs. The disk packs cost the same, $700, but Control Data's drives were $7,000 (about $36,512.81 today). You could use them on a DEC computer, you just needed an adapter card which cost $300 (about $1,564.83 today).
At one DEC shop, the system administrator got permission to add two drives. One was a brand-new DEC drive, the other was a CDC drive with adapter card (DEC drives didn't need one). Since he had to open the drives up to install them, he decided to find out why DEC's drives were so much more expensive. He installed the card in the CDC, and checked the connections. When looking over the DEC drive, he realized part of the extra cost was that the DEC drive has a built-in controller card. DEC makes smart drives that do all the translation work; CDC makes stupid drives where the computer does the disk location conversion work, thus the reason for the controller card.
After inspecting both drives carefully, he discovered the difference. The card, that's all. DEC was actually buying CDC drives, adding their own built-in proprietary interface card, putting their own housing on them, then rebadging them as DEC drives, and charging about $20,000 more for the DEC logo.