Prototype HP products brought into work; PIX!

One of my coworker's parents (sorry, don't know their names) worked at HP back in the garage days. They met at HP; the dad was an electrical engineer, and the mother was an industrial designer. They both worked on the "Winchester" hard disk drive prototype, one of the first hard drives. The dad did the electrical work, and the mom designed the enclosure. This one holds a tremendous 10 millibytes of data. :D

View attachment 10729
View attachment 10730
View attachment 10731
View attachment 10732

And check out this vintage kit! Homebrew days. :D At one point he replaced the 8" drive with 2 "new" 5 1/4" drives, but he could never get them to work with the computer. It appeared to only work with the 8" drive. Has HEX pad for programming the computer.

View attachment 10734

Apparently I'm limited to 5 attachments. Here're more pics: (warning, hires) http://www.wreckcenter.com/hp/

Man, my geek juices are in overdrive! 10 millibytes? What on earth could you store in that? Would that even store 1 typed character of information?

I think you may have meant megabytes (10 million bytes). Very cool system too. Who's that pretending to work and not gawk at the system in the background? .. for shaaaame!.

What are the dimension of that drive? Sorta looks like a disk pack color wise. Oh wait, it's the same size as that monitor?

That should be "one of HP's first hard drives". The IBM 305 and 1311 had been around long before the HP prototype.

Hey Chuck (or anyone else), were the common removable drive packs also metal platters like todays drives? I've always been curious as they seem to be colored and I'm not sure if that's a coating, or if they're some other material? Is it just the age or color of the plastic they're surrounded in that make them not look like the regular metal platters I'm used to seeing in hard drives these days?

Aluminum for the substrate has been the standard all along*, but the coating technologies have evolved. Most hard drives up until the 1980s used a floppy-disk-type oxide coating. More modern disks use sputtered or plated magnetic coatings.

__________________
* Plastic has been used, as has been glass; there was a project that went nowhere to use titanium. But aluminum (or alloys thereof) has always seemed to come out as the most cost-effective and stable. I believe that steel was discussed as an early possibility--just oxidise the metal for your coating.

My brother asked if she meant megabytes, and she said, no, her dad said it was 10 millibytes.

I don't know if you guys noticed the 17" iMac there in the background. This thing is huge.

olePigeon said:

My brother asked if she meant megabytes, and she said, no, her dad said it was 10 millibytes.

Click to expand...

Then she heard it wrong, because a byte consists of 8 bits, so the smallest you can go is 1/8th of a byte. A "millibyte" would be 1/1000th of a byte, which is impossible!

Yeah. I'm willing to bet it's 10 megabytes. HP Computer Museum says that the 9134B Winchester hard drive was 10MBs. I'm wondering if it's a prototype for that one.

But yes, 10MB as it should be was an amazing amount of storage back then and even more impressive in a single platter device that small (for the time). I still regret when a collector friend had finally hit bottom and ran out of resources we had to move his stuff to a few storage rooms and one thing (after moving his real gear and garage full of great things) we left behind was a 10 or 20MB IBM hard drive (well I'm kind of guessing, perhaps it was more per the weight). It was half the size of a washing machine and weighed a crap load. But no wheels that I recall and plenty of spider webs underneath lol and after a day full of moving heavy equipment we and he made the decision to leave it behind.

I'd probably never have used it so it was mostly a spider incubation habitat and probably would have been the same wherever it went. I'm still disappointed in myself for not saving it.