HEARTFELT FELICITATIONS
Lee Gomes at the Wall Street Journal does a nice little Q&A-driven celebration of the 50th anniversary of the humble disk drive. It is interesting to note that the hard drive is breaking the half century mark, while the personal computer only broke the quarter-mark recently.
As the piece reminds us:
"The first disk drive, called the RAMAC, was created by International Business Machines Corp. engineers in San Jose, Calif., in 1956..."
"The disks on it were 24 inches in diameter. The whole unit weighed over a ton, and had to be delivered on forklifts and loaded on to large cargo bays of airplanes. You had only five megabytes of storage. That's about five minutes worth of MP3 music."
Contrast that to where we're at now and where we're headed:
"The RAMAC stored 2,000 bits per square inch. In disk drives today, the figure is as high as 135 billion bits per square inch. That's almost a 70-million-fold increase. And in the next five years, we will ship more disk drives than we shipped in the first 50 years."
This technology has given us obvious consumer staples like the iconic iPod.
And we've barely touched on the coming mainstreet benefits of online storage.
One need only look at innovative services that can be designed atop the storage performance curves like, Flickr, YouTube, Google's Gmail, that have already become staple services for millions, just in the past half decade.
And of course, new emerging services like Sharpcast, Omnidrive and others, that I've mentioned in earlier posts, that are trying to forge new value propositions going forward.
Happy Birthday, disk drive, perpendicular or not. May you enjoy many, many more.
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