Lauren WeinsteinMar 7
Seagate is now shipping 44TB hard drives, using lasers to increase stored data density. They expect to reach 100TB in the not distant future, all in the same form factor that has been standard for decades. My first personally owned hard drive was 10MB, an 8-inch "Winchester" in a case twice the size as the disk to include the power supply and other electronics. It died after a few weeks. I won't even detail the disks I dealt with for PDP-11s -- massive multidisk platters that we'd take in and out of drives the size of washing machines. A bit less than 100MB formatted for the RP04.
Show threadNeil MoffattMar 7

@lauren Incomprehensibly vast storage capacity.

To describe computer users as spoilt is a kind of understatement.

I too experienced washing machine sized hard drives from 1983 at IBM. I worked on a robotic magnetic tape storage 'library'.

Show threadteresa_athomeMar 7
@NicelyManifest @lauren Reading this reminded me of the time I went to pull disk packs out of the archive and discovered that someone had put a stack of 4 or 5 on the floor and used them as a step-stool. 😱 They did not survive the experience. (The disks not the culprit, who escaped undiscovered.)
Show threadLauren WeinsteinMar 7
@teresa_athome @NicelyManifest Ouch. I used to be pretty nervous pulling them out of drives and putting them back in. I had this nightmare of the latch holding the platters inside the cake cover letting loose before I could get the plastic bottom piece in place.
Show threadNeil Moffatt

@lauren @teresa_athome I never got that close to disk drives. Sounds very risky normal work practice!

Now we have a flash card the size of a thumbnail with gigantically larger storage

Mar 7 at 8:30pmWeb