Volunteer Information Exchange Sharing what we know with those we know Volume 1 Number 14 September 4, 2011 Contribute To The VIE Questions These questions need your answers The 55 th anniversary of RAMAC, the first ever hard drive, is coming up Sept. 4, 13, Q: The Hollerith sorter has 26 slots. 24 of those are or 14, depending on your definition of under control of the tabulator. Two have manual announcement. So we'll feature that handles, and are not controlled by the tabulator. Tim game-changing device in this issue. Robinson asks, “Does anyone know what those two manually operated slots are for?” Do you have a favorite artifact, one that you know a great deal about? One that Q: I know that when Xerox PARC gave extensive you know a great story about? demos of the Alto computer, windows user interface, etc. to Xerox executives in Rochester, NY, the execs Help us ensure that all those stories are were not impressed, but (some of) their wives were. passed along. Contribute to the VIE. My question is: I heard that one of those wives later Jim Strickland [email protected] started a high tech company. Who, what company, was it successful, and did they use anything from PARC? Kim Harris This question was anwered by Al Kossow What if error messages were Q: A visitor told me that the speech given by the giant written in Haiku style? head in the Macintosh 1984 superbowl commercial was actually excerpted from a speech given by an IBM The Web site you seek executive. Who was the executive, what was the topic, Cannot be located but any other details? Kim Harris Countless more exist A: Al Kossow, CHM staff, directs us to a web site with comments by Steve Hayden, an Chaos reigns within. advertishing executive who was intimately Reflect, repent, and reboot. involved with the commercial. The following is Order shall return. from that site: http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising- branding/1984-good-it-gets-125608 . First snow, then silence. In the original board, there was no voiceover. The thousand dollar screen dies But, Richard O'Neill, the agency’s executive so beautifully. producer, called me from London where they were casting and asked if I could bang out something for Big Brother to say for casting CONTENTS purposes. I had lunch that day with my VIE 1 brother, David, who is an international lawyer Open Questions 1 and Sinophile. We kicked around phrases from Mussolini to Mao, and by the time I got Question – Macintosh Big 1 back to work, Big Brother’s speech just wrote Brother commercial itself. Ridley liked it so much that it wound HP 9100 A - First PC? 2 up in the finished spot. It did hold everything together. Happy Birthday RAMAC 2 Note that the director of the commercial was RAMAC Storage Efficiency 5 Ridley Scott who went on to direct “Thelma and Coming Events 5 Louise,” “Gladiator” and many more movies and television series and was knighted in 2003. Page 1 The HP 9100A - First PC? It is interesting that HP announced a new PC (the HP Compaq 8200 Elite All-in-One Business Desktop) just days after announcing that it will quit the PC business. But their exit is perhaps even more ironic considering that back in 1968 they released the HP 9100A, the first mass-market PC ever. Ads for HP’s 9100A, aimed at scientists and engineers in 1968, called it by different names: an electronic genie, a computing marvel and yes, a personal computer. The 9100A used mathematical notation rather than software code. It fit on a desk, and almost anyone could use it. It was a fairly capable general programming machine, but to reach a broader market, HP renamed it. “If we had called it a computer,” Bill Hewlett said, “it would have been rejected by our customers’ computer gurus because it didn’t look like an IBM. We, therefore, decided to call it a calculator and all such nonsense disappeared.” But it was powerful, capable of handling logarithmic and trigonometric functions with relative ease, probably one of the reasons why it cost $4,900. And it weighed a sizable 40 pounds. It didn't have an alphanumeric keyboard. It was kind of a glorified adding machine. The 9100A was a product of a time when HP was a leading innovator. The company was barely 30 years old that year, and it would follow up their newborn PC with other firsts in personal computing. They didn't define the PC age in a way that IBM did with the 5150, but they coined the term. That's something. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY RAMAC! • Sept. 14 - IBM Press Release states that the 650 RAMAC was announced in 1956 in multiple steps: RAMAC was announced. • Sept. 4 - IBM internally announced both the IBM The announcements followed the June 1956 RAMAC 650 and IBM 305 RAMAC, both of which shipment of the first (of 14) RAMAC prototypes to included the IBM 350 disk array. Zellerbach Paper Company, San Francisco, which we would now call beta test but that term was not in • Sept. 13 – New York Times article carried a public announcement of the RAMAC 305 system use in 1956. that included the RAMAC disk drive. This brings to mind a Continued on next page Page 2 recent remark from IBM CEO, Sam Palmisamo, engineer found that filtering the paint through a silk “IBM products aren't launched, they escape.” stocking and by filling a tray of paper cups with just the right amount of paint, the coating thickness Following are a number of comments about RAMAC would be the same from disk to disk. This system development excerpted from a 1989 speech by Rey was used for many years. It was later incorporated Johnson, manager of the IBM San Jose laboratory into the equipment that automated the process. and of the development team. • Another group of engineers was assigned to • This is the product that spawned the magnetic develop a small thin head for the record and disk storage industry – an industry that has since readback functions. About the only magnetic come to generate an annual revenue of 23 billion transducers in use in 1953 were those used with dollars. I think it fair to say that the RAMAC 350 magnetic drum and magnetic tape equipment. has carved a place in history for itself. Both of these had entirely different space and • The IBM Research and Engineering Laboratory positioning constraints than we had. opened its doors at 99 Notre Dame, a few blocks Early in the development of the read/write head from here [in San Jose], on February 1, 1952. • we decided to protect the head against wear by • We explored magnetic drums, magnetic tape using air pressure with nozzles in the face of the loops, magnetic plates, magnetic tape strip bins, flat head. The airflow spaced the head a uniform and even magnetic wires and rods. distance from the sometimes wobbly disks. Air • Rotating magnetic disks came out on top in our pressure was also used to force the head toward analysis, chiefly because of its rotational dynamics, the disk after it reached its destination. the potential of multiple accesses and the efficient • Stored bit density at the center tracks was made surface-to-size ratio. the same as the state of the art density in magnetic • [A] fortuitous event was the receipt of a request drums, 100 bits to the inch and 20 tracks to the to bid from the US Air Force Supply Depot in Ohio. inch. This was better than a 4,000% improvement They wanted instant access to each of their over punched cards in information density and the 50,000 item inventory records. We were data was alterable and erasable. simultaneously studying file applications in • In our first file model two-foot diameter oxide- wholesale grocery and wholesale paper supply coated disks were mounted on a horizontal shaft at companies in the bay area. We pooled these ½-inch intervals. Fifty-one disks gave 100 inside insights and information and prepared a set of surfaces. Two opposite facing heads were specifications for a general-purpose random mounted on one access arm.. The access arm access memory. These specifications recorded in was moved so as to place the heads on any of the February 1953, in his notebook by Art Critchlow, 100 tracks on each of the 100 disk surfaces at a turned out to be almost identical to the RAMAC speed that would match an accounting machine 350 disk file specifications announced two years cycle, which was less than one second. We had later. anticipated that there would be a need for as many • We tested the dynamics of rotating disks by as twelve access stations on each file. A provision mounting 120 aluminum disks two feet in diameter that proved to be excessive. The maximum travel on a shaft with about ¼ inch spacers and rotating between addresses was one-twentieth of an inch. this array at 3600 rpm. One test run of this model • Two access drive systems were designed and allayed out fears about problems of excessive wind modeled, one mechanical and one electronic-servo vibration, power requirements and even excessive system. We finally chose an electronic-servo disk wobble. system for the first file model. • However, one problem that turned out to be quite • On February 10, 1954, this first sentence was fed difficult was coating the disks with iron oxide paint into and read back from the disk file – “This has to a uniform thickness and smooth finish.