Question Ancient but revolutionary HDD: the IBM 3340 "winchester" HDD

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80251

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Jan 5, 2015
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Al Shugart, formerly of IBM, was the man who founded Seagate and worked on the IBM 30-30 "Winchester" HDD team.

https://www.computerhistory.org/storageengine/winchester-pioneers-key-hdd-technology/

iu
 
@Bob.B
I didn't even know RCA made mainframes, I always thought they made TVs. I wonder what prompted RCA's exit from such a lucrative business venture as mainframes? Wikipedia indicates:
"RCA suffered enormous financial losses in the mainframe computer industry and other failed projects including the CED videodisc system."
Doughnuts for memory, weren't those magnetic coils that were polarized by a strong current to represent a bit?
RCA still has a website, but I doubt it's anything more than a DBA now and the parent company isn't even a US firm.

@fzabkar
I'll bet you made a good living working on that ComputerVision CGP200X mini system.
What did you think of microcomputers when they were first introduced?
 
I had an Australian designed Microbee which was based on the Z80 CPU. I also had a Commodore PET (6502 CPU). The PET had only 4KB of RAM, plus a BASIC compiler in ROM, yet I was able to write a program to monitor and graph the output of a tensile testing machine. Nowadays all that extra processing power and storage capacity is quickly consumed by the OS. I think today's programmers have forgotten how to write concise, efficient code. In fact, I cringe when I think that a partition in a Windows PC starts at sector 2048. That's a whole megabyte of wasted space. In my day, PC HDD capacities started at 5MB or 10MB. The CDC HDD was 300MB unformatted, but 260MB (?) after formatting. Boeing designed their aircraft on those minis.

As the for the PCB hardware, in those days a typical minicomputer PCB was 15" x 15" and comprised 200 or 300 TTL ICs. I made a living out of on-site chip-level repairs. My competition were swapping whole PCBs at $10K each. I didn't have the benefit of circuit diagrams, but most of the problems could be solved with a logical approach.

For a nostalgia trip, you could lose yourself here:

https://mirrorservice.org/sites/www.bitsavers.org/pdf/

In fact, I have about 100 printed manuals from that era that I intend to donate to the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, books are some of the heaviest things to ship.
 
80251 said:
@Bob.B
I didn't even know RCA made mainframes, I always thought they made TVs. I wonder what prompted RCA's exit from such a lucrative business venture as mainframes? Wikipedia indicates:
"RCA suffered enormous financial losses in the mainframe computer industry and other failed projects including the CED videodisc system."
Doughnuts for memory, weren't those magnetic coils that were polarized by a strong current to represent a bit?
RCA still has a website, but I doubt it's anything more than a DBA now and the parent company isn't even a US firm.

@fzabkar
I'll bet you made a good living working on that ComputerVision CGP200X mini system.
What did you think of microcomputers when they were first introduced?
Click to expand...
Yup magnetic doughnuts with the 3 wires running through them not that junky stuff that came later called a chip.

Rca was one of the too many players in the main frame market something had to give.......consolidation.
 
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