bobamu (August 31, 2008 at 1:31 pm)

man, that's a lot of wires :Din 50 years time our current computers will look even more antique :D

akiratrooper (August 20, 2008 at 4:39 pm)

but still, SSD's produce great heat...it'll take some time before they develop a real HDD replacement

kurizzos (August 18, 2008 at 7:19 am)

Holy krap!Has anyone ever had seen the size of those HDDs?Plus, if you've programmed those mainframes with punch cards back then, it must've been hell to wait to see your syntax errors come out the compiler after a hour long wait.I'll never complain about a slow C++ compiler again.:)

motonymph (August 8, 2008 at 3:12 pm)

As a girl, I'd go on one Saturday a month with my father where he worked on these machines. Lots of noise in a big warm room with fans, elevated floors containing miles of wire that he sometimes needed to replace and rework. It was neat-o. I would rollerskate on those floors.

jay52592 (July 19, 2008 at 5:11 am)

Back then 5 MHz was very very fast!

cpmisalive (July 18, 2008 at 2:15 pm)

Wow! what a beast, I guess it uses only one side of the disc. The price must have been astronomical, the maintenance contract, eye watering. 600ms access time for the RAMAC vs. 6ms for a decent modern drive (100x faster)Modern drivs 6ms vs. 6µs for SSDs (1,000x faster)Modern hard disc drives have reached a plateau of performance, Flash memory will replace them in the very near future, my XPS has two 512GB SSDs and its like lightning.

Membrane556 (July 10, 2008 at 8:04 am)

Whats amazing is just ten years later they made a computer the size of a bread box for Gemini.

marshalauth (June 9, 2008 at 1:57 am)

Must have been really expensive and took forever to build

baronofcheese (June 2, 2008 at 1:36 am)

yeah, the first hard drive ever

baronofcheese (June 2, 2008 at 1:36 am)

as big as this thing was, it held only 5 mb of data, of course that was a huge amount back then...