Text 15092, 66 rader
Skriven 2006-01-28 17:03:00 av JAY EMRIE (1:123/140)
     Kommentar till en text av TOM WALKER
Ärende: Winchester Hard Drives
==============================
Nothing in here indicated when the "Winchester" name was introduced -
only that it was used to refer to disk drives.
JAy

TW> News Story by Frank Hayes

TW>OCTOBER 21, 2002 (COMPUTERWORLD) - The disk drive wasn't a new idea 50
TW>years ago. It just wasn't seen as necessary. Punch cards and magnetic tape
TW>could store unlimited data, though access to any particular item was slow.
TW>Magnetic drum devices, which stored bits of information on the surface of a
TW>rotating metal drum, could store between 2KB and 8KB of data and allowed
TW>quick random access. Who would ask for more?

TW>The U.S. Air Force, that's who. In 1953, an Air Force supply depot in Ohio
TW>wanted instant access to 50,000 inventory records—far more than drums could
TW>hold, and far faster than tape could deliver. A team of IBM engineers in
TW>San Jose spent the next year designing a 5MB device with a stack of 50
TW>2-ft.-wide disks spinning at 3,600 rpm, using compressed air to keep the
TW>single read/write head from crashing onto a disk surface.

TW>First Words on Disk

TW>On Feb. 10, 1954, the engineers wrote and read back the first words stored
TW>successfully on a hard drive: "This has been a day of solid achievement."
TW>And the mainstay of modern mass storage was born.

TW>IBM's RAMAC 305 gave the company an early lead in what Big Blue called
TW>DASD, or direct-access storage devices. But by 1962, other vendors were
TW>making mainframe disk-drive systems, and drive sizes had climbed to 28MB.
TW>The drives made online transaction processing practical, since businesses
TW>could now access large amounts of inventory and customer data in real time
TW>instead of using batch processing.

TW>But as the volume of online data grew, managing storage became a major
TW>issue. Drive capacity was still limited, so punch cards and half-inch tape
TW>were still widely used for batch processing, and tape was also used for
TW>backing up online transaction data. By the early 1970s, disk-to-tape backup
TW>and restore utilities were a standard part of mainframe operating systems.

TW>In 1973, IBM's San Jose labs made another breakthrough: The Model 3340
TW>Winchester disk, a hermetically sealed hard drive with lightweight heads
TW>that rode only 18 microinches above the disk surface, compared with 800
TW>microinches for the RAMAC. The resulting higher capacity, faster
TW>performance and lower cost made Winchester technology the new standard.

TW>One company that adopted Winchester technology was Shugart Associates,
TW>founded by onetime IBM hard-disk product manager Alan F. Shugart (who later
TW>founded hard-disk giant Seagate Technology). By 1979, Shugart Associates
TW>was attaching its hard drives to desktop computers using a
TW>device-independent parallel connection called SASI, for Shugart Associates
TW>Standard Interface. In 1982, SASI was renamed SCSI (Small Computer System
TW>Interface) and eventually became a standard for connecting storage devices
TW>to computers of all sizes.

TW>Through the 1980s, system vendors continued to improve utilities for
TW>migrating inactive online data to tape, consolidate unused storage space
TW>and compact archived data. In 1988, researchers led by David A. Patterson
TW>at the University of California, Berkeley, published their description of
TW>redundant arrays of inexpensive disks, or RAID. Arrays of disk drives had
TW>been used before to replace large, expensive disks, but Patterson's team
TW>developed a complete architecture that would eventually become an industry
TW>standard.                                                          

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