assuming this came from the same source as the rest this is actually a rip from the original tapes, either the tape was damaged (apparently many of the rips aren't good for that reason) or the person who made the rip for archive.org was working with poor equipment.
Michael Burke i checked it on archive.org it has the same problem. that collection is made up of direct copies from original tapes. many have bad audio or skipping problems due to codec and tape issues. it's not a pirate copy. cheifet talks about getting the tapes on archive in the episode of triangulation he was interviewed in.
The CEO of Seagate, in 1983, did not think the 5.25 inch floppy would ever be replaced, ever. I was surprised to hear that from him. It was obviously superceded by the much smaller 3.5 inch floppy by 1990, which actually lasted throughout the decade and into the new millennia.
But after 1995 the world did return back to the 5.25 inch technology as the more conventional and more robust way to store data. We still store youtube videos in 5.25" floppies! The unlimited storage capacity is simply unbeatable!
Dude seemed to have no imagination whatsoever, which is not a quality I find in modern CEOs. He seemed down-to-earth and focused on the current things that work, which is also not a quality I find in modern CEOs, and honestly is refreshing. I’m not surprised he rose out of an engineering background. His company seemed to do well under his leadership despite the myopic things he said in this interview.
SSDs had already been invented at that time. 6:45 shows magnetic bubble memory which was supposed to combine the density of magnetic storage with no moving parts. Intel sold these parts commercially.
Dude. There are technologies used these last 30 years as state of the art, which were (conceptually) already designed many, many years earlier. Some examples: Electroluminescense: 1937 Color CRT tube: 1951 Sony Trinitron tube: 1964 Thin-film Transistor LCD (TFT): 1973! Although full color TFT displays were not developed until late 1980's If you're into technology (and its history), it is often not that hard to predict which technologies will become dominant. Just by using common sense and logic. Unless another technology comes along quickly and supersedes the previous one. The bugger is, if you're smart enough to predict, you usually don't live long enough to actually see it become a reality. People like that, like Gary, are called visionaries for this very reason. Had he been alive, it would not have been so special. That said, Gary was a true gem to the team of people who revolutionised the computer industry.
@SteelRodent this. There can be a very wide chasm between developing fundamental technologies, and mass producing them at a cost which makes them competitive against other technologies. (For example, *flying cars existed in the 1980s,* but no one has been able to figure out how to store enough energy in a car-shaped and *car-sized* vehicle to let it fly 300 miles, much less the practicalities of millions of car flying around and not crashing into each other or crashing in bad weather that terrestrial vehicles barely notice.)
@@paulmichaelfreedman8334 touchscreens were invented in the 1960s too. I remember touchscreen computers in the late 90s in a few museums but they definitely weren't mainstream then
@@flexairz I disagree. Almost everything he said was accurate for reasonable time scales. His predictions were valid for at least 20 years which is essentially a lifetime in computer tech development. You're looking at it from the perspective of someone 35 years later and do not understand the scope of the developments or their time scales.
So glad I found this video, such a joy to see and hear my mentor the great Frank Sordello. I was good friends with Frank and his family. He consulted for me at HMT in Fremont in the 90's. Frank could always break down complex subjects to make them understandable like his "bent nail" analogy. I worked with his sons Mike, Chris, and Mark ... great family. Frank was such an inspiration and a great inventor. A magnetic recording guru... He is surely missed .
My guess is that Shugart was trying to defend his product line by ensuring the viewers that buying Winchester's weren't a waste of money. Sordello was more of an R&D type of guy. Hence why Shugart says solid state and optical discs were ridiculous to consider for future memory storage, as his company had nothing to gain if he said otherwise.
And at 10:22 he said that optical drives had a place as archival media (guess what we used CD-R for??), and that -- in 1983 -- rewritable optical media was still a laboratory curiosity. Which it was.
You will see. CD technology is popular only for a short time, the 5.25 inch floppy will return because unlimited storage is unbeatable. Out of memory? Just take one more floppy.
The floppy has unlimited storage capacity. Unlimited easily beats 512GB all the time! You will see, the data storage format in 2123 will be the 5.25 inch floppy!
The CEO of Seagate described floppy disks as 'infinite capacity' since you could spread your data across multiple floppies. The poor reliability of floppies made this an absolute nightmare.... get to disk 15 of your file copy and get an unrecoverable read error. PERFECT!
As others have mentioned, Frank Sordello of Memorex really knew the fundamental science and yet amazingly the legendary Al Shugart seemed to not. And, of course, it's always great to hear what Gary Kildall had to say. I'll bet if you popped in from the future and showed them an M.2 SSD the first question would be "why would anyone need that much storage?"
Listening to Sordello was immensely one of the most pleasurable things I've heard. His intellect and presenting it to the audience was soothing and futuristic, but not in a sci-fi way, just a real way that it all played out in reality over the decades to come. 40 years later we now have essentially disposable sd-card's in the hundreds of gigabytes size. Just incredible how everything progressed over time. I am only sad to see that only Stewart remains around to have seen this all unfold.
I think Shugart knew the science, he just seems more practical and interested in what is good to do in the moment. The tech that Frank was showing off was going to be the future, it was just going to take a while for that stuff he showed to be truly mainstream. Shugart was right that we were always going to need some kind of removable writable storage (we still use usb sticks today sometimes), but the floppy wasn't always going to be the only kind of removable writable storage.
OMG.. Gary Kildal was waaay ahead in his thinking.. his respectful disagreement was all over his face when Shugart was promoting large Floppies. How ironic Seagate sent Shugart his termination letter on a CD with Stephen Luczo’s picture on the cover.
Alan Shugart is a perfect example of how it isn't always the best idea to allow the founder of a company to remain CEO for as long as he wants. He ran Seagate until 1998. Based on this comically bad lack of foresight and strategic vision I cannot imagine how many dramatically wrong decisions he made during that time. In retrospect, the Board would have done well to fire him based solely on this interview. Seagate succeed in SPITE of him. This bad interview is actually really uncommon on Computer Chronicles. Most guests from industry were 100% on point about the future 5-10-15-20 years out.
@@jonathanstein6056 That's cool though. Politics deserves to be mocked. He also backed an initiative to have "none of the above" on the ballot in Cali. Props to him.
It's the end of 2019, and solid state drives have still not completely replaced the magnetic disc drives... So in that sense the man was right, magnetic drive technology still had a lot of life left from the 1984 perspective. :) But he was dramatically wrong how the 5,25" floppy drives would "never" be replaced by smaller floppies... It only took a couple of years!
He was simply downplaying all other technologies that could compete somehow with his. Still lots of incorrect statements designs to deflect away from the products mentioned.
@@joojoojeejee6058 He was talking about hard drives, the Seagate guy was defending floppy disks lol. The Seagate guy didn't thought that hard drives or optical discs would replace floppies. Now, the Memorex guy, now he was talking facts and saw future in optical discs.
it would be useless without the proper hardware/software to read/write it, and having all that would rise more questions to the point forgetting the media itself altogether!!!!
Some of Al Shugart's technology is here to stay. Many storage devices today use a derivative of the SCSI bus or SCSI command set. For example, SAS disks are Serial Attached SCSI. The spec started out as SASI, or Shugart Associate System Interface. SASI was later renamed SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) because standard names were not allowed to contain company names.
It's not tracking, this is a 3/4" tape with edge damage, or maybe capstan climb causing tape ripples during recording.There's no way around it except possibly ironing the tape, which has been done to recover damaged historically important video.
Alan Shugart may have been a great drive designer - (the first floppy disk I ever owned was a Shugart drive that I had hooked up to my TRS-80) - but I wouldn't exactly call him "a visionary". Q: "Some people say that..."[disc type devices]"...are gonna be replaced by semiconductor? What are your feelings about that, Al?" A: "Well, I don't think it'll happen." Q: Here's a 3½" micro floppy. Do you see this size as replacing the 5¼" format?" A: "No I don't. I think there's a marketplace for the smaller size..."[but]"...I don't see that they'll ever replace the 5¼" mini floppy." Still love the man, but not a great predictor of the future!
Shugart thought that the magnetic storage used for floppys would keep improving and eventually store more and more in a smaller space. He was definitely wrong but he figured that the size would be the standard and it would allow backward compatability with all programs. An interesting idea, but a wrong one.
The interview with mister Shugart was disappointing. Basically he said that everything's going to be the same as it was in 1983. He couldn't be more off: * Semiconductor storage has replaced floppies when it came in removable devices like floppy disks. That was only a matter of time. * That argument about 3.5" disks is rediculous. Did Shugart really think that the software from 1983 would never be updated? And what obstacle would there be with writing it on different media anyway?
Well possibly, but keep in mind he died as a multi-billionaire. So who cares he made some wrong predictions. He was an engineer and business leader, not a psychic.
@@oldtwinsna8347 One does not need to be a psychic to make predictions. The advances of the 3.5 inch floppy was obvious so it should have been clear it will replace 5.25". With semiconductor memory I understand him more but one should really never use the word "never" as that will make you look fool.
Blows my mind that they've already been talking about perpendicular recording in '83...if I'm not mistaken we've only just seen this in modern hard disks like 4 or 5 years ago. Anyway, what a great show this was...and Gary Kildall sure knew how to wear a suit :-)
The way he explained makes it very easy to understand for both advanced and common viewers. It's still the same 3.25 inch harddrive technology we use today, only the density is increased alot over time.
cdrw became popular in about 1997 and flash storage was becoming popular around 2005 so the Memorex guy predicted 15 to 20 years and the viewers at the time had no idea how it could happen.
But it is true. Nobody will ever rewrite the programs from 5.25 inch disks to something else. It just isn't done, it's totally wasted effort. 5.25''floppies will live forever!
The PC would be a hell of a gym with the disc swapping necessary to play more recent larger games like the 100GB GTA5 off of floppy discs with their "unlimited" storage capacity.
While, on the whole, the Seagate guy was wrong on several (almost all) points, I have to admit I have many 25 year old 5.25" floppies that are still in perfect working condition, unlike many CDs I recorded...
The memorex guy is legend, he's talking gigabytes, he sees no limitations on increasing density and he believes in opticals when they are eraseable. Today we use harddisks in gigabytes and burn rewritable cd's. But you can't blame the floppyguy, his floppies are interesting for home consumers in that time.
Time flies!! 9 yrs ago CDs were still common. I bought a new laptop at the time and was so satisfied that I could play CDs n video discs. Later I replaced it w Blu-ray drive and was ecstatic 😅
Well either way. Optical media did eventually become writable, but unfortunately it was unreliable and super slow compared to just about any HDD. So it never replaced the HDD, it only served as a backup or archival media at best.
6:46 that ''bubble memory board'' or wathever he calls it has 1MB of storage and is basicaly the first ever SSD...look how big this is...1MB...crazy it's almost the size of a microATX motherboard!
Mbit. it was 1/8th the size, so it was actually 128K. bubble memory isn't a marketing term, it was a different type of memory to regular RAM and is probably analogous to modern flash memory, but much slower which was its downfall.
Wow, it's truly a wonder that Seagate survived at all with this guy in charge. He was shown the precursors to the hallmark storage technologies of the 'Information Age' and smugly pronounced them all dead ends in the span of 2 minutes.
He was right though. That CED disk was analogue and never used to store binary data. CD-ROM's were still in development and wouldn't really become a replacement for floppy's until the introduction of affordable CD-recorders in the late 1990s more then 15 years later(Before that premade CD-ROMs were much more like the old ROMs on 8bit computers and the cartridges in consoles). That bubble memory failed completely and the form of solid state memory we use today is based on eeprom technology which is completely different in how it works, and that didn't become available until 2000 (very expensive) and didn't become mainstream for 5 years. And 5,25 floppies were still in use in the 1990s because they were cheaper then 3.5 ones. (I used to have an external 5,25 for my Amiga because the price difference was so big)
Just casually downloading several years and a few gigs of Computer Chronicles to my phone wirelessly while lying in bed and having it complete in a few minutes like a freaking maniac
Poor Alan Shugart... he behaved like a dinosaur already in 1983, holding on to the past and trying to downplay the future. I know, he invented the floppy disk, SCSI, the Shugart connector.
Holy moly, Frank Sordello died of colon cancer at 62 in 1999. He was only 46 here but definitely a rough 46 especially compared to today's standards...
CDRW never replaced floppy disks, floppy disks remained useful at the same time. If nothing else, they pretty much have both disappeared at about the same time. Flash sticks killed them both, but I would still rather have backups on either of them than a flash drive. I have rarely had a flash drive survive more than a year top. SD cards etc are better. As soon as SSD technology reaches the point where the data is safe in the long run, they will get smaller and replace everything else. Perhaps 15 years from now, tops.
Trusteft To an extent. CD-R(W) was and is more for permanent archival, though the format had a short term for trading larger files before the advent of the thumbdrive. Nowadays, if you want to permanently archive something, you burn it to a DVD-R(W) or, if you have exceptionally large files or an absolute TON of them, a BD-R, while you trade on thumbdrives and SD cards. You are right, as soon as SSD tech reaches archival quality for the price of current SD cards and thumb drives, there's going to be very little use for optical media.
@@Trusteft For me they replaced. I basically stopped using floppies when I got my CD writer. Sure CDs were soon replaced by DVDs. Then I switched to hard disks for backup. SD cards are fir cameras and phones, a different use. USB memories are needed only for data transfer from computer to computer.
@@jesuszamora6949 Before the thumb drives got cheap. In 2005 a 512 MB USB drive was 30 € here. A ten pack of CDs was 5 €. USB memory was nice for what it held but if you needed more you did not g o to buy several of those, you used CDs. A few years later you could pick 2 GB for 20 €. Also a major point was when Windows 98 and NT became obsolete. Those had poor and no support respectively for USB memories.
This is awesome -- bubble memory, laser discs, Shugart explaining that solid state drives will never be price-competitive (of course, he was right specifically with respect to bubble memory )...
No wonder seagate got sold out to Toshiba. This guy had terrible vision for how things could evolve. He's convinced nothing would change in the 80s when everything is moving insanely fast
6:47 “I don’t think it will happen..” - This way of thinking is analogous to the current discussions about EVs versus ICEs. It takes people who can or dare to think outside existing paradigms. Gary clearly could do that.
He said 5 ¼" disks would never be replaced 🤣 as the had infinite storage capacity because you could just use more diskettes and that the cost per bit would never be less than floppies and finally there was just too much data in the world on 5¼" disks to be replaced! 😄 🤣 wow how short sighted. My cell phone probably have more storage in my pocket at all times than every floppy disk ever made in 1983 lol
Considering he steered Seagate into one of the top storage companies through his retirement in 1997, I'd say yes he did move to where the market swung. Don't underestimate Shugart - he is one of the most successful tech industry leaders of all time. When he eventually died, his net worth was in the billions.
Who is watching this in 2020 and laughing about the comments about 3.5" floppies, yet crying that storage really hasn't increased as much as it should have and we still reply so heavily on mechanical storage. Oh - and we still don't have flying cars.
Wow, Shuggart was off on everything they asked him, Never in our wildest imagination be able to transfer stuff from 5.25 floppies to 3.5 floppies LOL..
Wow Mnr Seagate CEO was wrong with almost every single "prediction" he made. Thinking solid state storage will never overtake SSD's, 5 1/4 disks will never be replaced with 3 1/2" disks etc.... so wrong
Well, the interviewer should be knowledgeable on this type of thing .. He was one of the very first people to ever come up with a computer programming language and operating system for a personal computer.
in one of the episodes in this season the guest host actually said that he was asked how powerful computers would get back in the late 60's. he was...wrong, he said he wouldn't make such uneducated guesses again. i can't remember who it was, i think george morrow. also i don't think gary kildall actually created any personal computer languages for personal computers, that was MS' territory. he DID create the first real PC OS though, CP/M.
maboroshi1986 you would be wrong. Kildall wrote PL/M for Intel 8080 processors, CP/M was written in PL/M. PL/M stands for Programming Language for Microcomputers. MS wrote only Basic and then licensed it for a bunch of computer mabufacturers (such as Altair, for example, or Commodore, or Apple).
Ivan Bažulić yeah forgot about that one, i meant DR more i guess because they were mainly the OS company and ms (pre DOS) was primarily a languages company.
Seagate Shugart: "Technology will forever remain how it is in 1983. Buy my company's shit right now. You should, but I don't buy or use our shit." Why was he even allowed on the show? He added nothing.
They had not much of a clue of what the future would bring 38 years ago. Of course the can't be blamed for that. Today we also have no idea what computer technology will be like in 20,30 or 40 years. We can make educated guesses, not more.
Very knowledgeable people and pioneers but they never come over as arrogant unlike many of those that talk at you about technology and computers today.
These episode are a very interesting documentation of early micro computing, that is the rapid momentum and super fast acceleration it caught in the 80s due to rapid leaps in miniaturisation and effective imagination and capitalisation for making it happen.
Amazing how Al Shugart was so wrong in so many ways in this single episode. The reason why most people today are more cautious when taking of the impact of a future technology
Its funny hearing ppl talk about the vulnerability of HDD's in the 80's when desktops literally never got moved, especially back then when you needed a key to open em up. You had to be ballin' to have a $10K laptop w/any utility.
it was an issue. Just lifting up and moving box to another desk next to it could be deadly if you forgot to park the heads. Auto parking heads solved all that.
Even with ONE uSD slot in our phones, it's annoying, this, this unlimited storage, because you fill up a card with videos, photos & downloads, then you buy a new memory card, insert it, and yay, u can now store even more. BUT,.... where is that photo....? Oh yeah, it's on the other uSD card! Can u find it? Can you find the ejection tool (pin) to insert it? Or do you have to take the battery out of your phone before you insert/remove a memory card??? Not easy! I'd like my phone to have about 16 uSD card slots!!
@@the_eminent_Joshua_E_Hrouda But that would mean a bigger/thicker phone and anyone knows that users don't want that but the smallest and thinnest phone possible. Even if that means not being able to replace the battery when it fails after 3-4 years and they have to buy a new phone/tablet.
An enjoyable episode where the guests were actually allowed to speak and articulate themselves without being cut-off at any given moment by the sometimes obnoxious-seeming presenters.
This might be the best episode of the computer chronicles. We're still dealing with magnetic disk drives, as nothing's really come along that can match their price per gig. It's interesting that he talks about magnetic disks having 200 million bits per square inch, and now we have 100 billion bits per square inch. Just a fascinating episode.
@20:00 Wonder if that problem was ever solved. It was never used in floppies but don't know if that technology got used in magnetic backup tape systems.
Gary was born in the wrong time. He should've been born decades later so he could interact with computing devices more akin to his level of intelligence. Let's face it, it was a shame he had to relegate himself to wimpy computers of the 70s, 80s, and only got the see the glimmer of modern Pentium based computing start before his death. He missed out on the entire Internet commercial infrastructure, the gigantic rise in Moore's law enabling to where we are with supercomputing devices to wearable smart watches. All these could have benefited from his programming knowledge.
I know that the "Micro focus" guy at the beginning and end says "the story of this continuing evolution". But I always hear it as "the story of discontinuing evolution". :(
