[OFB Cafe] Early IBM Hard Drive

[Rick Bowers]

At 1/18/2009 04:14 PM, you wrote:
>This is a 5 Megabyte IBM Hard Drive circa 1956.  Makes you 
>appreciate your 4 Gigabyte USB Flash Drive, doesn't it?
>
>-Don Spoon-

Yep! I worked with some 12GB IBM drive that were much smaller back in 
the '70s. About the size of a small washing machine.

They had 20 read/write heads. One week-end we had a head crash, so 
called IBM support to come repair it. The novice IBM Customer 
Engineer that showed up (he must have drawn the short straw for 
week-end duty) decided he would "test" to see if the problem was the 
removable disk pack or the heads. So he spun down the drive, took the 
disk pack out, put it in one of our other drives (we had 20) and spun 
it up. Loud squealing sounds came from that drive, too, so he 
declared "hmmm, this drive has bad heads, also". He tried the pack in 
a third drive, which also "appeared" to have bad heads. When I 
realized what he was doing, I stopped him before he put the disk pack 
into a fourth drive.

I heard the R/W heads were in the neighborhood of $1,000 each. IBM 
replaced about 40 of them and took the entire week-end to do it.

Ahh, the memories ...

I also miss Pan American Airlines, now that you pointed that out. ;-)

~Rick