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In a remarkable period of just under a quarter of a century, the hard drive has evolved from being the size of a refrigerator with barely any memory to what we have today. The first hard drive arrived in 1956 when IBM introduced a disk drive that featured 50 disks that measured 2 feet in diameter. This monster had a capacity of 5 Mbytes (5,000,000) and was roughly the size of a refrigerator. This size was shown in the movie, Apollo 13, when the main character tells a group of people that it is possible that the day would come when there would be a computer that would fit in a single room. In 1961, IBM had another major breakthrough when they introduced the first disk drive with air bearing writing heads. Air bearing heads is the term that describes the writing heads that float on a current of air. The air doubles as a filtering medium keeping the magnetized heads from being contaminated by air borne particles. Air bearing heads were a stepping stone to the next big break through. IBM continued to be the ground breaker. In 1973, they introduced the model 3340 which is considered to be the predecessor to all modern hard drives. The model was in place, but there was still a long way to go to get us to the current time. The problem of size was going to be the next frontier settled. Some of the IBM design engineers were leaving to form their own companies. One such company, Seagate Technology, came out with the ST506 which was the first drive for microcomputers. This movement toward smaller and smaller size while at the same time more and more capacity has taken us from that 2 feet diameter drive holding 5 MB to the new 3.5 rigid drives that measure 3 and one half by one inch and hold 400 GB (400,000,000,000 bytes of data). Obviously, hard drives are still evolving. In ten years, we may laugh at what we use today. Each passing day seems to bring more miniaturization and more capacity. Hard drives are now found in a variety of devices including gaming consoles and digital recording devices. They are not also found in cell phones. Lap top computers have become popular and practical because of the smaller sizes possible. It is almost hard to imagine where this process will end and the practical application of hard drive technology is heading toward uncharted waters.
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