Two terabytes

My two new 1 TB disk drives arrived today, delivered by the postman and left on my front porch. While they are really nothing special (larger drives are readily available), I am in awe of the technology that can store a million megabytes in a device that basically fits in the palm of your hand.

Energizing the “way-back-machine,” I recall that around 1970 I was writing and running FORTRAN programs on LLNL’s G-machine (the serial number 1 CDC 6600 used for unclassified computing at the time).

CDC 6600

Quick note. The CDC 6600 was a 10 MHz clock machine and would benchmark in the 1 Mflop (1 million floating point operations per second) range. As a comparison, my Mac Pro clocks at 2.8 GHz and achieves 10’s of gigaflops.

Anyway, the storage capacity of the computer center (meaning the machines running with classified programs and data) was not very high. I remember the excitement when the lab took delivery of the first IBM 1360 Photostore—the first device able to store a terabit (that’s just 125 Gbytes). Note how many equipment racks it occupied. It was write once technology and its access time was measured in seconds (but it was a whole lot faster than waiting for an operator to go to the tape vault and mount a tape that had your data on it).