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50 Comments
- smellinator, on 10/12/2007, -2/+1121956, and you're just getting around to posting this now? ;-)
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+25But does it run Linux? :p
- deepsub, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13You can't run Damn Small Linux on it.
It would require Really F**king Tiny Linux. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -2/+14Honestly I'm getting sick of being directed to someone's blog where they copy 1/2 the article and then link you to the full damn thing. Can we cut that ***** out please?
- dhughes, on 10/12/2007, -0/+10 Instead of trying to load Linux on it just get Linus Torvalds to read the kernel code to you line by line. It would probably be faster.
- SmartITGuy, on 10/12/2007, -2/+11badave -
Delete porn? Why the hell would anyone ever do that?
...More like delete the WORK to make room for porn! - Klarth, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9Only reason IBM doesn't manufacture this model anymore is due to the intervention of the RIAA. I've heard that you could probably use it to, uh, illegally store a single song.
- chicken101, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10In 1956, 5mb was like a petabyte is today.
- checker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+9check out here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_350
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+9No. DSL is too big.
- moylan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7interesting lookback at what was then an obscure invention only of interest to some engineers. wonder what the daily news media of the time made of it. or did it even merit a mention? now how many homes don't have a hard drive of some sort?
at my job when i started 15 years ago they still serviced cpm computers that had full height 5-10mb drives. some of those lasted to about 95. now my phone has over 512mb of flash storage.
times move on. doesn't always mean that all that extra power/capacity is any better than those old systems. - MarcusE, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9Hook up ten of those, and you just might be able to get Damn Small Linux ( http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/ ) on 'em.
- jockser, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9does is support RAID 0 ?
- mvprj84, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6The full article that he got it from has a picture of the whole magazine article:
http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/05/19/1956-first-hard-drive-5mb/ - loneBoat, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7Heh-heh, 'old news', eh? Isn't that the point. 1956? Geez...
- pufuwozu, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9It's a hard-drive. It's only limited by capacity.
So yes, it could. - crythias, on 10/12/2007, -1/+6heh. Compare that hard drive to this: http://www.picotux.com/
32-bit ARM 7 Netsilicon NS7520, 55 MHz
2 MB Flash
8 MB SDRAM
Linux on it 720 KB and more
Price: starts at 100 euros (apparently euro symbol doesn't work on digg) - master_of_fm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5like in Enterprise how the Vulcans gave us velcro, that was funny
- richbradshaw, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5Funny how the bigger storage is available, the more people think it is important to store. i.e. how many people working with that drive felt it necessary to store personal music files (yes - I know they weren't invented!) on it - now we have more storage, most people do this. In those days all that was stored on it was text files, and for that, 5MB is huge!
- SmartITGuy, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I'm convinced that periodically - aliens who are too impatient with our SLOW technological progress - give us these little technological tidbits now and then.
...Here look, a transistor, microscopic switches - the building block of digital stuff!
...Here look, lasers!
...Here look, liquid crystal... You can make displays out of it! - samdu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3You answered a big part of your question already. As hard drive capacity has grown, so have the number of things available in digital format to store on them. People didn't think about storing their music electronically because it wasn't possible. Same with pictures and video.
- badave, on 10/12/2007, -5/+8You mean they were wondering what porn to delete to free up more space even then?
- ear1grey, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5RAMAC and the rest of the IBM timeline:
http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/history/decade_1950.html - deepsub, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3I got the impression that this is not longterm non-volitile storage
It was used as RAM. - Zippo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3lol, at that size, you could probably see the bits with the naked eye.
- thefinger, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3it's a lesson in history, you twit
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Was this ASCII?
The reason I ask, is that the definition of "character" can be less than 8 bytes. - Certain, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4A guy from at my job brought in a drive from 1984 I believe it was. I forget the capacity but the damn thing was huge. I thought that was something. Then I see this.
- SmartITGuy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yahoofrom -
In 2050 I'll be laughing at what you wrote as I'm holding my fingernail sized 500 Exabyte 1 femptosecond FLASH card/chip. - browell172, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I can't stop looking at the chick in the t-shirt ad.
- yahoofrom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Well then
hard drive in 2050 : 500 terabytes - VorpalK, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Excellent question. Since this was an IBM device, there's a good chance it was EBSDIC (if that encoding was even invented then), which is a 7-bit encoding, IIRC...
Edit: no and no. EBCDIC was created about 5 years later, and Wikipedia says it is 8-bit, while ASCII was 7 at the time... Meh.
In all likelyhood it was six-bit Binary Coded Decimal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary-coded_decimal#IBM_and_BCD - Serinox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1i blame it on latency
- deepsub, on 10/12/2007, -3/+3Is it -really- that hard to click on the 'real' link on the blogs?
I hate link spam as much as the next Digger, but the complaints about real links are almost as annoying. - campusman, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0Hey cool! Their drives in the 1950's had plastic windows on them too! And I thought WD was the first one to do this! Big Pimpin baby! :o)
- Phobic, on 10/12/2007, -4/+4I wonder if they have a Sata version?
- diggmaddy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+0I wonder if he could've posted it on "digg" in 1956, even if he wanted to :P
- daRoach, on 10/12/2007, -3/+2Smart Guy, what has convinced you to believe that? I'd like to see the evidence. Leave it in a plain paper bag next to the pier before midnight. No questions asked.
- silentvirus, on 10/25/2008, -2/+1Man, this would've been useful to me a few days ago...I just did a paper on the history of computers.
- scruffmaster, on 10/12/2007, -1/+0I cant believe people cant get over this. This thing's been posted like a gazillion time already.
- astrofrank128, on 10/12/2007, -2/+0It's hard for me to imagine storing a media file on it... would that actually be possible? Plus yeah, it did say it was RAM. Would make an awesome DIY lamp with a few cathodes/LEDs, regardless.
- nitrojunky24, on 10/12/2007, -4/+1I have to say that believing that aliens give use the technology is extremely arrogant. I mean if that's so then How did they come up with it then they had to have someone come up with it also right? and if they do exist who said there evolution was any faster then ours maybe there evolution started way before ours did and now there ahead of use purely based on time. that's if its even true.
- WackyT, on 10/12/2007, -5/+1Dead link.
- r00tus3r, on 10/12/2007, -8/+4slow news day ...
- Daniel591992, on 10/12/2007, -7/+1old news if you ask me...
- Phobic, on 10/12/2007, -10/+3I want one! Now!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -9/+1"This happened to me here"
Completely different. Your article was old, duplicate and pretty crap, and yet you're STILL spamming it. Go die. - Splitt3rxx, on 10/12/2007, -20/+4OMG THIS I*S LIEK 50 YEARS OLD!!11 REPORTED!!111
- richbradshaw, on 10/12/2007, -25/+6Old News
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -39/+4This happened to me here: http://digg.com/links/First_Ajax_Article_on_Digg
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