jerryc41 Loc: Catskill Mts of NY

We should all be thankful for what we have now, especially when you think of what life was like in the old days. Here's a picture of an early IBM hard drive that held a whopping 5MB of data and weighed 2,000 pounds.

http://www.businessinsider.com/picture-of-ibm-hard-drive-on-airplane-2014-1

jgitomer Loc: Skippack Pennsylvania

If you think the size and weight were bad the disk access times were really bad. The unit pictured had 25 platters (if my memory is correct). The base model had only one arm. To access data it first had to move the arm up or down to the platter and then the arm moved in to the track on the platter containing the data.

Due to the resemblance in both appearance and operation they were nicknamed the Jukebox.

Jerry

Jim_In_Plymouth Loc: Plymouth MN

I have always maintained that those that refer to the good old days of data processing were not there.
Or at least had not been in a computer room at 3:00 AM because that was the only time they could get machine time to test.
Or had been on all fours in a computer room trying to put a dropped source deck back together.

gessman Loc: Colorado

In my early computer days, the late '60s, I was a programmer on an IBM 360-20, Cobol, Fortran and then RPG III, a machine that had two 5 platter drives like that but smaller. I never had the benefit of using one like they're unloading there but I did see plenty of them. We did the accounting for a college as well as the student records and class schedules.

What I loved most was making corrections on the console keyboard without benefit of a monitor. All input was punch cards and when you had an error that kicked your program out during processing, you had to make either kill the run and fix the error in a new card, starting the deck feed again from scratch, or make the correction on the keyboard totally without benefit of being able to see what you were doing other than watching your fingers make contact with the keys that changed the data in the memory registers in order to continue running the program that you'd keyed into the cards. The card readers were the bottleneck in the process so you didn't want to start over anymore than you had to.

I know, I know, to all those who didn't start with computers back then, what I just said is very much like telling kids how hard it was back when - about walking to and from grade school barefoot 5 miles in snow with the wind blowing 20 mph in both directions. :mrgreen: So I'm a boring old guy who likes to talk about the past but I'll tell you, I sure wouldn't want to go back to those "good ol' days."

TomMcIn Loc: Maple Ridge BC Canada

I started working with computers in 1961 using an IBM 1620 in the Women's Rest Room at the University of Alberta, Calgary. Input was via switches, punched paper tape or a Selectric typewriter that doubled as the output device. Never saw one of these disks but have seen a variety of others. It as been a wild ride when I now see what an iPhone will do.