The beautiful sound of every computer lab at 8:30 AM in 1987, with the ozone filling the air, people typing in BIOS Startup sequences, and loading in floppy disks. A bygone era that nobody in this age will ever experience. *Including me, I am only 16.*
I can hear the sounds of clicking keyboards, and the the calming sound of floppy disk drives. And the hum of CRT monitors. I'd love to get a time machine and travel to the early 80s.
@@cupcakethesabertooth6802 Same with me and I will never experience it. Probably my best bet would be buying a PC XT and making a room that looked like an office of the 80s
@@cupcakethesabertooth6802 There are a lot of LS series chips that are still made today. So if that's fried it wouldn't be too much of an issue. Is it shorted?
You can fit an entire computer inside that case today, hell you’re likely using a device with 250gb or more of memory in the palm of your hand reading this right now.
The funny part is that the head travel on the very first CD ROM drives (or at least the one I had) used magnets and coils of wire like newer hard drives use for their head travel. Of course CD ROM drives quickly moved away from that and now use stepper motors instead.
The first voice coil drives from the early 1970s used a big linear actuator. The acceleration of some of those is quite incredible- enough to shake the whole rack it was mounted in. Seagate made a line of hard disks in the mid-1980s and early 1990s which used linear actuators.
Computer rooms used to be quite loud, especially if everyone started up at once. You could rip a mean stinker quite comfortably without anyone hearing it.
Yeah computer rooms full of these in school when I was a kid was loud. Computer classes in the late 80's early 90's the rooms were all loud and hot it was hell.
@@Corpsecrank My first computer (worked with, not owned) was an IBM 370xa (model 3081) ARC system with the 10 pound, 14" IBM 2311 drives (64 of them). Watch the 1983 movie "War Games" with Matthew Broderick. Look at the computer room behind the "WOPR". Take away that prop and the big screens and you see a 308x system. City of Hope children's cancer research hospital, Duarte, CA 1979. My first personal HDD was a 20 MB SCSI hard card, which in 1994 was in such bad shape that I needed to "kick Start" it with a toothpick going through a screw hole every time I booted up my 386sx. I was so aggravated by Windows 95 that I left the computing world entirely until XP came out.
This is a Seagate ST251 from 1988-1989 and is 40MB not 5MB. A 5MB hdd would not autopark its head during spin down. It is likely 5MB due to bad sectors
@enriqueamaya3883I regret taking my grandma’s advice to love Jesus in response to me stubbing a toe to this very day. Jesus didn’t fix that damn door threshold, I tell ya.
I remember having to “park” the heads to keep them from “crashing” into the hard drive platters. The heads floated just above the disk platters, and they would land, making physical contact, destroying data, if you didn’t seek them to the landing zone before powering down. This one auto-parked on shutdown. This is also how the term “system crashed” came into vernacular for any time the computer faulted.
@@danielgomez7236 Hard drive eads soar with ground effect of air moving with plates. When plates don't spin, heads lay against the surface. So they could scratch the surface on startup. The landing zone is the area with no data recorded, so brushing the surface there does very little harm.
@@u2bear377 From the park disk software instructions I was told that you would only need to "park the disk" if you were to move the computer to another place, in order to prevent any possible damage, the inside parts of the HDD would move to safe positions so you can safely take the computer elsewhere, it would take a few minutes to park the disk.
The sheer amount of tech we’ve managed to create from some hot rocks and some more hot rocks combined with only our brain is nothing short of incredible. Thinking about it is mind boggling.
@@whyamiwastingmytimeonthis an SSD is preferable than an SD card though lol better price/TB ratio , quality and doesnt just stop working, and way cheaper than SD card
@@regisegek4675 probably true, but I think the in terms of density/“futuristic feel” an SD card wins in this case. Though, if you want to get the most in terms of TBs per dollar, hard drives are still the king.
Probably the most common 5 MB drive is the Shugart (later Seagate) ST-506, which was a full-height drive. It was superseded by the ST-412 (10 MB) and the half-height ST-225 (20 MB). As others have pointed out, the drive in this video is likely an ST-251 or ST-277.
ah, reminds me of the old days, servers in shelves with no cooling, run from powerstrips from mains outlets with no ups, mail server SCSI HDD spinning and making a crunching sound. Never forget those early days, happy memorys that seem so long ago.
Back in 1988 we needed a larger hard drive in the mainframe so the computer company sent a tech out to piggyback the 15 mb with a 30 mb.The bill was $5k The computer was branded by Insight and it weighed 120lbs,had massive motherboards and spools of wiring,it used a clunky slow tape cart backup that took 3-4 hours We've come a long way,baby
When computers almost needed a pallet jack to move. It would have mostly been the power supply and things like that as there were already 20MB 3.5MB disc for home PC by then. So only about a pound or two of that total machine.
I know that SSD's are pushing out hard drives, but I just cannot stop appreciating the beauty of this technology. The mechanical precision especially. Etching data as a microscopic spiral of magnetic pattern on a disc made of metal. It's just beautiful in its very principle.
The internet (the cloud) still lives on disk drive arrays because the energy requirements and cost are still lower for large amount of data. Disk arrays are used where data bits are redundantly split between drives to multiply up the data rate and allow instant recreation of last data after a disk failure.
I don't think you find spinning drives going away any time soon. If you compare the MTBF and other reliability criteria, there is no choice for truly secure and reliable bulk data storage other than enterprise class spinning drives. I would be extremely worried if I lived in a world where everything was kept on solid state memory devices.
When I first got my Compaq portable in 1984 it had 2 floppies. A year or so later I took out 1 floppy and put a Seagate 40mb in its place. The upgrade from floppy to HD was like night and day! WordPerfect was what got me through college! Dot matrix printer at first and then a 20 characters per second daisy wheel! 😂
@CH67guy - and before WordPerfect there was Ashton Tate's MultiMate word processing software. You should remember that. What You See Is Not What You Got😂😂😂
@@friendlypiranha774 I am not familiar with anything prior to WordPerfect, except for whatever the Trash 80s ran when I was in high school. I graduated high school in 1985 and was off to college just a few months later with my Compaq portable. I was truly blessed to have such an amazing machine. In its day it was state of the art. I think mine cost $3,000 in 1984. That’s $9,018 in 2024 dollars.
And will continue to get smaller too, this is a curse of singularity, eventually technology will achieve nano techs level and that's where the danger comes!
I attended the Kingston School of Signals in the late 1980s and they had in storage an old memory card from the early 1970s. It was the size of an LP album, had visible copper windings, and held a massive 16 kilobytes. Now we've got chips the size of the pupil of your eye that hold a billion times more information-and can retain that information even when they're switched off.
@@shane99ca My first PC had 64 kilobytes, and yet was soooo fun, and such a valid tool to learn stuff. For example I learned to write simple programs in basixc on it and thus got a basic understandsiong of programming and how computer öanguages work
It just passes a seek test, and during the spinup it doesn't actually find it's locating marks either (long seek) so it doesn't even pass a calibration. Not to mention that the stepper is jamming! It definitely does not work.
I remember when my best friend got his brand new 160 MB hard drive. So huge, it could practically hold the entire world on it. Man, those were fun times. When Prince Of Persia was a very graphically demanding game and if you had a Trident video card with 1 MB of RAM, you were in the ELITE class of PC enthusiasts.
Thinking about how far we have come in Just 40 years, I wonder what it will look like 40 years from now. I remember building the XTs in 83 and 84 and I remember having to PREP the drive before it could be formatted It took about 3 hours to PREP the 5 MB drive Then another 3 hours to Format it I remember 10 years later having my first HP digital camera, and it took a 10 MB CF card that cost 50 dollars and the camera cost 500 dollars I also remember the first cable TV boxes with the 25 foot wire and the first VHS machine with the 25 foot wired remote control. I remember 1983 the first wireless cable box, TV and the first portable VHS camera, 4 bags, battery lasted 60 minutes, weighed 80 pounds I remember the FIRST cell phone Not the 800 MHz one, the 33 my one It was a two way radio, low band we had 2 frequencies We would key up and press ** To get the dial tone We dialed using the DTMF keypad on the GE radio To hang up we pressed ## We could talk anywhere The radios reached almost 200 miles I remember the first pagers, voice, tape You called a phone number assigned to you, had 30 seconds, and the tape recorded the message and then transmitted it on the low band frequency, twice. If you missed the message you were out of luck I miss the old days Less people and quiet and peaceful
I used to be able to sell all the 29Mb hard disks I could get, the PC had no HD operating system on the main board then, so the disk drive came as a full length card with its own controller. They were £549 UK Sterling.
I still have a 8086 XT Turbo (8 MHz) that was fully functional last time I made use of it back in the day (late 80s). It has a 20MB HD (added), one 3.5" drive (added) and two 5.25" (original). Originally came with a green phosphor monitor and a Monochrome Graphic Adaptor (MGA) that then got upgraded to a Hercules... that was the thing back then! What a definition!!! Then it got upgraded to a CGA (Color Graphic Adaptor) with a 16 colour palette. I even remember the printer, it was an Epson LX-86 dot matrix. It is still in my parents house back in my home country.... it would be interesting to get it to run again.
didn't know that it even exist in 80s. Got my first Sinclair ZX Spectrum in 1992 when was 5 yo(USSR copy with 48kb) it goes with 5.25 floppy disk drive. It was marvelous time...
@@krashd Speccy was probably one of the worst 8bits, having only a single block colour or just an outline with the background showing through looked shit and the sound was just a couple of beeps and squeaks.
Lived it. I had the Seagate ST-225 20 Meg HD back in the day in an XT clone ... I recall it sounding much like that. Those were the days... look how far we have come in such a short period. Now -- completely silent 1-2 TB SSD for 1/3 (or less) the price.
The Sinclair ZX Spectrum micro pc was in use around the same era as the commodore 64 and it was at the time a pretty cool computer. I wound up with the last of the hardware of the Western Australian club decades ago! Games like Sabre Wulf, Attic attack and Knight lore were awesome in the day. Games that used every 48 Kilobytes of available ram and now we have double digit Gigabyte games that look almost photoreal, this will still look basic in the decades to come! 😊😊
In the early '80's Radio Shack sold a 5 MB hard drive. It was the size of an end table top, weighed about 50 pounds, cost $4000.00, and would crash with the slightest vibration if it was running.
I remember my 20 mb Miniscribe hard disk drive, on my then new Philips NMS 9115 PC, in 1989. I remember the soind of that hard disk, and i also enjoyed the sound of the 5 1/4 floppys. Inserting a 5 1/4 disk into the drive, turning the bar clockwise and listening the fss fss fss... Wow, that were computers... I miss those old days
This would be really cool if you build a pexiglass case that has an Arduino so with a press of a button you could activate it. The irony would be that the Arduino would have more computing power than a 1980s desktop.
Takes me back to my first job working with PC's in 1988--am I the only person here old enough to remember doing low-level formats with MFM, RLL and ESDI drives and keying in of bad track lists which were usually on a sticker on top of the drive?
I remember when I could afford a Persci dual density dual 8" floppy drive. It used a voice coil positioner for fast seeks. Two, count 'em two megabytes of storage. But when you could only have 64k of ram that's not a problem. A disk for the OS and all your applications, leaving the other for data. Those were the days.
My second computer had a pair of ST225s so I do remember it well. Always got the hand me downs, mom upgraded and I got the leftovers. I really wish I'd kept all that stuff, what a treasure it'd be today.
You're by far not the only one. Just last week, I finished recapping the 1.44 mb floppy drive in a mint PS/2 "laughable" that was around $12k new (including the 300 baud modem and 20 MB hard drive). Novel used to take them on sales calls because they had enough horsepower to act as a portable server. My first ever PC based machine had a 5mb MFM. My first ever computer was a TRS-80 coco2 with...count 'em... FOUR 5 1/4" floppies chained together with a ribbon cable. IDE was a godsend. LOL!
My HD made those exact same sounds and hearing this video brings back memories! Back then I had a Compaq portable suitcase computer. I still have it, but it won’t boot up. I remember that before turning it off I would manually “park” the hard drive. Not with my hand, but rather I’d type something into DOS that parked it! That was an amazing and virtually bulletproof computer. It got me through 4 years of undergrad and a buddy of mine used it during law school. I long term loaned it to him, while I did law school computing on a Zenith portable computer and then I got a Gateway tower of some sort! The Gateway was just before Windows 95 made its debut. Fun times back then, or perhaps a living hell, depending on your perspective on things.
I bought a job lot of old car parts in an online auction from the US a couple of years ago, among the parts were some chrome trims wrapped in a newspaper from the 80's. A quarter page advert caught my eye,proudly proclaiming" At last the storage solution you have always promised yourself" underneath a picture of a 10 mb hard drive for the bargain price of $4995😂
It must’ve been something unlike anything else. It sucks, because there was a time where I had a similar experience. It was 2002, and I was five years old. My dad took me to the IBM office building where he worked, and we went up to his floor where he told me to be very quiet. I heard humming hard-drives, clacking keyboards and the ever-so-soft whine of CRT monitors. But the one thing that really sticks with me is the smell of the office. The air was heavy and somewhat stale, and it carried (for any lack of better wording) a staticky musky smell to it. Almost like ground pepper but not quite so. The carpet was one of those extremely thin gray ones that kind of muffle your footsteps even if you lead with the heel of your foot. Dad came in to get something, got caught up with a colleague, then before I knew it I was back out of the building heading to the car. I don’t know why, but I’ll never forget that.
This hard disk is likely a Seagate ST-251 or ST-277 which means it was produced in the late 80s and had a size of at least 40MB. Not even close to early 80s or 5MB! This disk is also non-operating due to a jamming stepper actuator. There are a bunch of missed steps during the seek test.
Man, found one of these in the surplus room at my department. Was blown away to see a motor driven arm like that, having only ever seen the electromagnetic ones. Makes sense that they started out like this.
I remember the relief knowing I didn't have to sit for 45 minutes loading 3.5" floppies when software started coming out on CDs. It felt like going from a tricycle to a Vette.
I haven't heard that sound in a very long time. I had forgotten what they even sounded like that then but as soon as I heard it start up it all came back lol. Crazy how quiet a machine is today compared to back then.
Thank you! Now...for the first time...I understand why there was always a warning to let a computer that you just turned off STAY turned off for 10 seconds or so. Watching those platters continue to spin well after the power was cut finally drove the point home.
I've been recently re-building some old PCs for my collection (from diskless 5150 all the way to the mighty P1 60Mhz) and was attaching old IDE drives to MoBos (amazingly, they all worked!). Would you believe that, when I heard the sound of one or another, it immediately brought back memories from the past? Each had a specific sound and I could picture immediately my DOS days with WD40MB, the Win 3.1 days with my Conner 340MB, my OS/2 adventure with the MASSIVE Fujitsu 850MB.... Spinning time machines experience!
Yes!! Good old Windows 3.1....which you had to launch from DOS. I remember the revolt when Microsoft introduced Windows '95 as an actual operating system. And you needed disk 19 if you wanted Solitaire. 😂
Fascinating to look at such a complex and complicated machine, knowing this was at a time the peak yet is or very soon will be considered a quaint reminder of the days when we had to mix high tech computing with physical analogue and or mechanical engineering. Similar to the way most people would view the old "click and bang?" Telephone switchers. Im only half way, it's only been 35 years but fark it feels like forever and and instant at once so far 😢
I came into the business in 1973 when a 2.5 mb disk drive cost around us$ 40,000. Head crashes were a common problem, often destroying multiple disk packs (cartridges). Oh joy !
Beautiful old historic sounds. 😁😂 Modern technology uses low power but still powerful processors (in phones and tablets for example) some PCs have water cooling and SSD's don't make any noise compared to these old spinning Hard Drives. Back in the day, technology made quite a bit of noise - even like, connecting to the internet with a modem was noisy as hell..! Kids today won't know any of the sound of old tech.. - the whirring and spinning up of a hard drive, the clicking sound as it seeks the disk. Floppy drives too were super loud considering how small the disks were. The disk almost sounded like it was grinding as it rotated for the read/write head to pick up the information on the magnetic surface. No direct contact either - just made a hell of a lot of noise just rotating and seeking. - Modems connecting to the internet - Old computers with large spinning fans (also, CPU coolers that had high pitched whirring motors and small fans) - Typewriters were heavy and loud, you really had to push hard to print a key on the paper physically - CRT televisions had the imperceptible high pitched whine that only kids could hear. I could tell when a television was even switched on in my entire home when I walked in through the front door just from the super high frequency being emitted, - VHS, DVD and film projectors - all made noise when spinning, seeking or getting up to speed. VHS especially were large clunky mechanical devices that went CRUNCH when loading the cassette into the machine and fast forwarding and reversing was a deafening motor sound... - Dot matrix printers put ink on paper by smashing the ink head into the paper and literally 'printing' the ink using force. Modern printers use a fine mist/spray to apply ink to the paper, no contact required.
I serviced those for DEC back in 78-80. Also a full blown 36 bit mainframe with 768k memory. Every cabinet full of muffin fans for cooling the big 18"x24" circuit boards.
In September 1981, Apple offered it's first 5MB hard drive (The ProFile) at $3,499. That's about $750,000 per GB, or 768 million per TB. Something that can be had now for less than $100.
I recall getting a Tandy 1000TL and deciding on the 20Mb Western Digital over the 40Mb Seagate. "Who would ever need 40 meg of storage???". Clock speed was also switchable between 8Mhz and 4Mhz so the pc could run older software.😂. Optional modem ran at 1200 baud. 😂
Back when video games came on a handful or a dozen double-sided / double density floppy disks... I remember when I had a machine with a 2505 MB hard drive and 4 MB of ram. I thought I'd never have to delete anything ever again!
I wonder if they had to adjust the height of the heads to be able to do this. The reason hard drives are either hermetically sealed (modern) or placed unsealed into powerful vacuum housings (pre-modern), is that any sort of particulates in the air could settle on the platters and easily exceed the head clearance, causing a "crash" where the head contacts the medium and damages both. In severe cases, that rust-coloured magnetic coating could be scraped down to the bare, shiny, silvery metal underneath.
I remember a time when PC's didn't even had a hard drive and in order to use them, you had to use something like 12 floppy's each morning to load the operating program...
