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Storage Devices (5/7/1984)

Floppy drives, hard drives, and bubble memory.

Guests: Al Shugart, Seagate; Frank Sordello, Memorex; Gary Kildall, DRI

Products/Demos: 5 ¼ inch floppy drive, 3 ½ inch floppy drive, RCA CED videodisk, 3680 1.2 GB spindle disk


This movie is part of the collection: Computer Chronicles

Keywords: Episode year: 1984

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Reviewer: akohler - - February 3, 2012
Subject: Some neat facts
As others mentioned, the video is jumpy and static-filled at the beginning, but it settles down after a few minutes.

It was interesting to note that Frank, from Seagate, felt that smaller floppies woild never replace 5 1/4-inch ones due to the amount of programs already released on 5 1/4, and that optical storage would not become widely used until it was fully erasable and rewritable.

I also learned that hard drives were called "Winchester drives," which according to the Wikipedia was because they initially had 30 MB of removable and 30 MB of fixed storage, so they were named after the Winchester 30/30 rifle.

I still don't know what a laser card was, but I'm planning to find out.

Reviewer: gdement - - December 9, 2006
Subject: First few minutes of video are jumping
Great episode, except the first few minutes have that annoying jumping problem that sometimes happens with films. It would be very nice if that can be corrected. I was viewing the mpeg2 file.

It's pretty cool to see all the various storage technologies being discussed. I thought Shugart (Seagate founder) was a great guest, and showed an ability to distinguish between neat gimmicks vs. practical devices for computers in the 80's. His biggest miss was predicting that 3.5" floppies wouldn't replace the 5.25", but even that took many years so his prediction wasn't that bad. His commentary mentioned several competing formats of 3.25, 3.5, 3.75" floppies, which I never heard of before.

The massive drive platter shown by the Memorex guest was pretty cool. He indicated that 9 of those platters on a spindle totals up to 1.2GB, so if I understood correctly the platter is about 136MB.
There was also some discussion of perpindicular recording - something which I believe has only recently begun to be employed on production drives.

Reviewer: cpt_mocha - - August 12, 2003
Subject: Old hard drive platters and optical disks
This was a fairly interesting episode with regards to the old technology and especially the attitudes and beliefs of Al Shugart (CEO of Seagate) and Frank Sordello (Vice President at Memorex).

Al Shugart seemed like he was in a bad mood or maybe just egotistical about the discussion, it's difficult to tell. In any case, he didn't seem interested in being there. It's interesting to hear his remarks about the "micro-floppy" (aka the standard 3 1/2" floppy) not becoming more popular than the old 5 1/4" floppy, as well as his somewhat negative comments regarding solid state and optical drives. I wonder if he owns any CD or DVD writers or USB pen drives??

Frank Sordello on the other hand is very enthusiastic about the different technologies and showed samples of hard disk platters and optical disks. His comments demonstrated that he had a better idea of where these technologies were headed.

Until I watched this episode I had no idea that multi-gigabyte hard drives existed in 1984! Amazing! Sordello showed this huge disk platter and said it was one platter of a 9 platter hard drive that was 10 Gigabytes total storage or something like that... Cool.... =)