Hard Disks

From: Allison J Parent <allisonp_at_world.std.com>
Date: Thu Aug 28 19:57:09 1997

<From: "Zane H. Healy" <healyzh_at_ix.netcom.com>
<In this book under the chapter on Drives I found that it talks about three
<types of disks; Hard Disks, Winchester Disks, and Diskettes. It also has

Funny most hard disks are winchester in base technology even if they are
removable!... The osborne folks tended to make strange distinctions.

<The text says the disks cost about $150 each and the drives between
<$3000-10000. All in all a very fascinating looking peice of hardware!
<I've never seen anything like them other than on mainframes, were these
<very common?

A common one was the CDC hawk drives at 10mb per pack. As they were often
more expensive than the cpu they were on they were not frequently seen on
the likes of apples and s100 systems. They were more often seen on Novas,
PDP-8s, PDP-11s and other minis. The larger multiplatter drives were even
to costly for the smaller minis and were seen at those sites that had the
larger PDP11s or even bigger machines.

Back in 1980 a Hawk (10meg) was something close to twice the price of a
complete NorthStar* Horizion with two floppies, 64k and terminal. Two years
later non removable drive would be quite cheap compared to that but
removeable platter drives would still command a premium. Now a Zip drive
compares to common IDE hard disks.


Allison
Received on Thu Aug 28 1997 - 19:57:09 BST