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External data storage: from the time of IBM 1311 to the present day. Part 1


What was, it will be;
and what has been done will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

Ecclesiastes 1: 9 The

eternal wisdom of the epigraph is applicable to almost any industry, including one that is rapidly changing like IT. In fact, it turns out that many of the know-how, which they are only starting to talk about now, are based on inventions made several decades ago and even successfully (or not so) used in consumer devices or in the B2B sphere. This also applies to such a seemingly newfangled direction as mobile gadgets and portable storage media, which we will discuss in detail in today's article.

You don’t have to go far for examples. Take the same mobile phones. If you believe that the first “smart” device, which completely lacked a keyboard, is the iPhone, which appeared only in 2007, then you are deeply mistaken. The idea of ​​creating a real smartphone that combines a communication tool and PDA capabilities in one case does not belong to Apple, but IBM, and the first such device was presented to the general public on November 23, 1992 as part of the COMDEX telecommunications industry exhibition in Las Vegas , and in mass production this miracle of technology came in 1994.


IBM Simon Personal Communicator - the world's first touchscreen smartphone

The personal communicator IBM Simon was the first mobile phone that basically lacked a keyboard, and information was input exclusively using the touch screen. At the same time, the gadget combined the functionality of the organizer, allowing you to send and receive faxes, as well as work with e-mail. If necessary, IBM Simon could be connected to a personal computer for data exchange or use as a modem with a performance of 2400 bps. By the way, text input was implemented in a rather ingenious way: the owner had a choice between a miniature QWERTY keyboard, which, given the 4.7-inch display size and 160x293 pixel resolution, was not particularly convenient to use, and the PredictaKey intellectual assistant. The latter only displayed the following 6 characters, which,according to the predictive algorithm, they could be used with the greatest probability.

The best epithet that can be characterized by IBM Simon is “ahead of the time”, which ultimately determined the complete fiasco of this device on the market. On the one hand, at that time there were no technologies capable of making the communicator truly convenient: few people would like to carry a device with a size of 200 × 64 × 38 mm and weighing 623 grams (and together with a charging station - more than 1 kg), the battery lasted only 1 hour in talk mode and 12 hours in standby mode. On the other hand, the price of the issue: $ 899 with the contract of the mobile operator BellSouth, which became the official partner of IBM in the USA, and over $ 1000 - without it. Also, do not forget about the opportunity (but rather even the need) to purchase a more capacious battery - “only” for $ 78.


Visual comparison of IBM Simon, modern smartphones and fir cones

With external storage devices is also not so simple. According to the Hamburg account, the creation of the first such device can be attributed again to IBM. On October 11, 1962, the corporation announced the revolutionary IBM 1311 storage system. A key feature of the new product was the use of replaceable cartridges, each of which contained six 14-inch magnetic plates. Although such a removable drive weighed 4.5 kilograms, it was still an important achievement, since at least it was possible to change the cassettes as they were full and transfer them between the units, each of which was the size of an impressive chest of drawers.


IBM 1311 - data storage with removable hard drives

But even for such mobility had to pay for performance and capacity. First, in order to prevent data corruption, the outer sides of the 1st and 6th plates deprived of the magnetic layer, and they, in combination, performed a protective function. Since only 10 planes were now used for recording, the total capacity of the removable disk was 2.6 megabytes, which was still quite a lot at that time: one cartridge successfully replaced â…• a standard reel with a magnetic film or 25 thousand punched cards, while providing random access to data.

Secondly, the cost of mobility was the decline in productivity: the spindle speed had to be reduced to 1,500 rpm, and as a result, the average access time to the sector increased to 250 milliseconds. For comparison, the predecessor of this unit, IBM 1301, had a spindle rotation speed of 1800 rpm, and a sector access time of 180 ms. Nevertheless, it was thanks to the use of removable hard drives that the IBM 1311 became very popular in the corporate environment, since such a design ultimately made it possible to significantly reduce the cost of storing an information unit, making it possible to reduce the number of purchased installations and the area required for their placement. Thanks to this, the device turned out to be one of the most long-lived by the standards of the computer hardware market and was discontinued only in 1975.

The successor to the IBM 1311, which received the 3340 index, was the result of the development of ideas laid down by the corporation engineers in the design of the previous model. The new data storage system received completely sealed cartridges, due to which it was possible, on the one hand, to neutralize the influence of environmental factors on magnetic plates, increasing their reliability, and at the same time significantly improving the aerodynamics inside the cartridges. The picture was supplemented by the microcontroller responsible for moving the magnetic heads, the presence of which made it possible to significantly increase the accuracy of their positioning.


IBM 3340, nicknamed Winchester.

As a result, the capacity of each cartridge increased to 30 megabytes, and access time to the sector decreased exactly 10 times - up to 25 milliseconds. At the same time, the data transfer rate reached a record at that time 885 kilobytes per second. By the way, it was thanks to the IBM 3340 that the Winchester jargon came into use. The fact is that the device was designed for simultaneous operation with two removable drives, which is why it received an additional index of "30-30". The world-famous Winchester rifle had the same index, with the only difference being that if in the first case we were talking about two disks with a capacity of 30 MB, then in the second it was about the caliber of a bullet (0.3 inches) and the weight of gunpowder in a capsule (30 grains, i.e. about 1.94 grams).

Floppy Disk - the prototype of modern external drives


Although it is the cartridges for IBM 1311 that can be considered the great-great-grandfathers of modern external hard drives, yet these devices were infinitely far from the consumer market. But in order to continue the genealogical tree of mobile information carriers, you first need to determine the selection criteria. Obviously, punch cards will remain overboard, as they are the technology of the "pre-disk" era. It is also hardly worth considering the drives based on magnetic tapes: although formally the coil has such a property as mobility, its performance can not be compared even with the first samples of hard drives for the simple reason that magnetic tape provides only sequential access to recorded data. Thus, the closest to hard drives in terms of consumer properties are “soft” drives. And the truth is:floppy disks are compact enough, and, like hard drives, can withstand multiple rewriting and are able to work in random read mode. Let's start with them.

If you expect to see the three treasured letters again, then ... you are absolutely right. After all, it was in the IBM laboratories that Alan Schugart's research group was looking for a worthy replacement for magnetic tapes, which were perfect for archiving data, but lost to hard drives in everyday tasks. A suitable solution was proposed by senior engineer David Noble, who joined the team and designed a removable magnetic disk with a protective casing in 1967, which was worked with a special drive. After 4 years, IBM introduced the world's first floppy disk, which had a volume of 80 kilobytes and a diameter of 8 inches, and already in 1972 saw the light of the second generation of floppy disks, whose capacity was already 128 kilobytes.


An 8-inch 128-kilobyte IBM floppy disk

In the wake of diskette success, Alan Schugart decided to leave the corporation in 1973 and start his own company, called Shugart Associates. The new enterprise was engaged in the further development of floppy disk drives: in 1976, the company launched 5.25-inch compact disks and original disk drives that received an updated controller and interface. The cost of Shugart SA-400 mini-floppy at the start of sales amounted to 390 US dollars for the drive itself and $ 45 for a set of ten diskettes. In the entire history of the company's existence, it was SA-400 that became the most successful product: the shipment rate of new devices reached 4000 units per day, and gradually 5.25-inch floppy disks displaced bulky eight-inch counterparts from the market.

However, Alan Schugart’s company was not able to dominate the market for too long: already in 1981 Sony took the baton, introducing an even more miniature floppy disk, the diameter of which was only 90 mm, or 3.5 inches. The first PC to use the new-format internal drive was the HP-150, released by Hewlett-Packard in 1984.




Sony's first personal computer with a 3.5-inch Hewlett-Packard HP-150 drive The floppy disk from Sony turned out to be so successful that it quickly replaced all the alternative solutions on the market, and the form factor itself lasted almost 30 years: mass production of 3.5 inch floppy disks ended only in 2010. The popularity of the new product was due to several factors:

  • a hard plastic case and a sliding metal shutter provided reliable protection of the disk itself;
  • , , ;
  • (, , ).


Timeless classic - a 3.5-inch floppy disk Sony

Along with compactness, 3.5-inch floppy disks differed and much higher capacity compared to its predecessors. So, the most advanced 5.25-inch high-density floppy disks, which appeared in 1984, contained 1200 kilobytes of data. Although the first 3.5-inch samples had a capacity of 720 KB and were identical in this regard to 5-inch floppy disks of four density, already in 1987 high-density disks of 1.44 MB appeared, and in 1991 - expanded density, containing 2 , 88 MB of data.

Some companies have attempted to create even more miniature floppy disks (for example, Amstrad developed 3-inch floppy disks that were used in the ZX Spectrum +3, and Canon produced 2-inch specialized floppy disks for recording and storing composite video), but they did not take root. But external devices began to appear on the market, which ideologically were much closer to modern external drives.

Iomega's Bernoulli box and the ominous "clicks of death"


Like it or not, the volume of floppy disks was too small to store quite large amounts of information: by modern standards, they can be compared with entry-level flash drives. But what in this case can be called an analogue of an external hard drive or solid-state drive? Iomega products are best suited for this role.

Their first device, introduced in 1982, was the so-called Bernoulli Box. Despite the large capacity for that time (the first drives had a capacity of 5, 10 and 20 MB), the original device was not popular because of, without exaggeration, the gigantic size: the “floppy disks” from Iomega had dimensions of 21 by 27.5 cm, which identical to A4 paper.


It looked like the original cartridges for the Bernoulli box.

The company's devices have gained popularity since the Bernoulli Box II. The size of the drives was significantly reduced: they already had a length of 14 cm and a width of 13.6 cm (which is comparable to standard 5.25-inch floppy disks, if you do not take into account the thickness of 0.9 cm), while differing in a much more impressive capacity : from 20 MB for models of the starting line up to 230 MB for disks that went on sale in 1993. Such devices were available in two formats: in the form of internal modules for PCs (due to their reduced size, they could be installed in place of 5.25-inch floppy disk readers) and external storage systems connected to the computer via the SCSI interface.


Second Generation Bernoulli Box

The direct heirs of the Bernoulli box were Iomega ZIP, introduced by the company in 1994. Partnership with Dell and Apple, which began to install ZIP-drives in their computers, largely contributed to their popularization. The first model, the ZIP-100, used drives with a capacity of 100 663 296 bytes (about 96 MB), boasted a data transfer rate of about 1 MB / s and a random access time of no more than 28 milliseconds, and external drives could be connected to a PC via LPT or SCSI Somewhat later, the ZIP-250 with a capacity of 250,640,384 bytes (239 MB) appeared, and at sunset the ZIP-750 series had backward compatibility with ZIP-250 drives and supports working with the ZIP-100 in legacy mode (from obsolete drives only read information). By the way, external flagships even managed to get support for USB 2.0 and FireWire.


External drive Iomega ZIP-100

With the advent of CD-R / RW, Iomega creations naturally sunk into oblivion - sales of devices have declined, having fallen by almost four times by 2003, and already in 2007 completely disappeared (although the liquidation of production took place only in 2010). Perhaps everything would have turned out differently if the ZIP did not have certain reliability problems.

The thing is that the device performance, impressive for those years, was provided due to the record RPM: the floppy disk rotated at a speed of 3000 rpm! Surely you already guessed why the first devices were called nothing more than a Bernoulli box: due to the high rotation speed of the magnetic plate, the air flow between the writing head and its surface was also accelerated, the air pressure dropped, as a result of which the disk came closer to the sensor (Bernoulli's law in action). Theoretically, this feature was supposed to make the device more reliable, but in practice, consumers were faced with such an unpleasant phenomenon as Clicks of Death - “clicks of death”. Any, even the smallest, burr on a magnetic plate moving at great speed could irreversibly damage the writing head,after which the actuator parked the actuator and repeated the attempt to read, which was accompanied by characteristic clicks. Such a malfunction was "contagious": if the user did not immediately orient and insert another diskette into the damaged device, then after a couple of attempts to read it, it would also become unusable, since the writing head with the broken geometry itself damaged the surface of the floppy disk. At the same time, a floppy disk could also kill another reader at one time. Therefore, those who worked with Iomega products had to carefully check the health of floppy disks, and on later models even the corresponding warning labels appeared.if the user did not immediately orient and insert another diskette into the damaged device, then after a couple of attempts to read it also became unusable, since the writing head with the broken geometry itself damaged the surface of the floppy disk. At the same time, a floppy disk could also kill another reader at one time. Therefore, those who worked with Iomega products had to carefully check the health of floppy disks, and on later models even the corresponding warning labels appeared.if the user did not immediately orient and insert another diskette into the damaged device, then after a couple of attempts to read it also became unusable, since the writing head with the broken geometry itself damaged the surface of the floppy disk. At the same time, a floppy disk could also kill another reader at one time. Therefore, those who worked with Iomega products had to carefully check the health of floppy disks, and on later models even the corresponding warning labels appeared.and on later models even the corresponding warning labels appeared.and on later models even the corresponding warning labels appeared.

Magneto-Optical Discs: Retro Style Hamr


Finally, if we are already talking about portable storage media, we cannot but mention such a miracle of technology as magneto-optical disks (MO). The first devices of this class appeared in the early 80s of the 20th century, however, they were most widely used only in 1988, when NeXT introduced its first PC called NeXT Computer, which was equipped with a Canon magneto-optical drive and supported working with 256-disk drives MB


NeXT Computer is the first PC equipped with a magneto-optical drive

The very existence of magneto-optical disks once again confirms the correctness of the epigraph: although thermo-magnetic recording technology (HAMR) has been actively discussed only in recent years, this approach was successfully used in Moscow Region more than 30 years ago! The principle of recording on magneto-optical discs is similar to HAMR, with the exception of some nuances. The disks themselves were made of ferromagnets - alloys capable of maintaining magnetization at temperatures below the Curie point (about 150 degrees Celsius) in the absence of an external magnetic field. During recording, the surface of the plate was preliminarily heated by a laser to the temperature of the Curie point, after which the magnetic head located on the back side of the disk changed the magnetization of the corresponding region.

The key difference between this approach and HAMR was that the information was also read using a low-power laser: a polarized laser beam passed through the disk plate, reflected from the substrate, and then, passing through the optical system of the reader, hit a sensor that detected a change in the plane laser polarization. Here you can observe the practical application of the Kerr effect (quadratic electro-optical effect), the essence of which is to change the refractive index of the optical material in proportion to the square of the electromagnetic field strength.


The principle of reading and writing information to magneto-optical disks

The first magneto-optical disks did not support rewriting and were designated by the abbreviation WORM (Write Once, Read Many), but later models appeared that supported rewriting. Overwriting was carried out in three passes: first, the information was erased from the disk, then the recording was carried out directly, after which the integrity of the data was checked. This approach provided guaranteed recording quality, which made the MO even more reliable than CDs and DVDs. And unlike floppy disks, magneto-optical media were practically not subject to demagnetization: according to manufacturers, the data storage time on rewritable MOs is at least 50 years.

Already in 1989, two-sided 5.25-inch drives with a capacity of 650 MB appeared on the market, providing a read speed of up to 1 MB / s and a random access time of 50 to 100 ms. At the sunset of the popularity of MO on the market, one could meet models that accommodated up to 9.1 GB of data. However, the most widely used compact 90-mm discs with capacities from 128 to 640 MB.


Compact magneto-optical disk with a capacity of 640 MB manufactured by Olympus

By 1994, the unit cost of 1 MB of data stored on such a drive ranged from 27 to 50 cents depending on the manufacturer, which, along with high performance and reliability, made them a completely competitive solution. An additional advantage of magneto-optical devices compared to the same ZIP was the support of a wide range of interfaces, including ATAPI, LPT, USB, SCSI, IEEE-1394a.

Despite all the advantages, magneto-optics also had a number of disadvantages. For example, drives from different brands (and MOs were produced by many large companies, including Sony, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Maxell, Mitsubishi, Olympus, Nikon, Sanyo and others) turned out to be incompatible with each other due to the formatting peculiarities. In turn, high power consumption and the need for an additional cooling system limited the use of such drives in laptops. Finally, a three-time cycle significantly increased the recording time, and this problem could only be solved by 1997 with the advent of the LIMDOW technology (Light Intensity Modulated Direct Overwrite), which combined the first two stages into one by adding magnets built into the cartridge with the disk, which also erased information.As a result, magneto-optics gradually lost its relevance even in the field of long-term data storage, giving way to the classic LTO streamers.

And I always miss something ...


All of the above clearly illustrates the simple fact that no matter how brilliant the invention may be, it, among other things, must be timely. IBM Simon was doomed to failure, because at the time of its appearance, people did not need absolute mobility. Magneto-optical disks became a good alternative to HDD, however, they remained the lot of professionals and enthusiasts, since at that time the mass consumer was much more interested in speed, convenience and, of course, cheapness, for which the average buyer was ready to sacrifice reliability. The same ZIP, with all the advantages, could not become a true mainstream due to the fact that people did not really want to look at each floppy disk under a magnifying glass, looking for burrs.

That is why natural selection ultimately clearly delimited the market into two parallel directions: removable storage media (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray), flash drives (for storing small amounts of data) and external hard drives (for large volumes). Among the latter, compact 2.5-inch models in individual cases have become the unwritten standard, the appearance of which we owe primarily to laptops. Another reason for their popularity is cost-effectiveness: if the classic 3.5-inch HDDs in the external case could hardly be called “portable”, they also required the connection of an additional power source (which meant that you still had to carry the adapter with you), then the maximum that 2.5-inch drives might need is an additional USB connector, while later and more energy-efficient models did not require this either.

By the way, PrairieTek, a small business founded by Terry Johnson in 1986, owes the appearance of miniature HDDs. Just three years after the opening, PrairieTek introduced the world's first 2.5-inch hard drive with a capacity of 20 MB, called PT-220. 30% more compact compared to desktop solutions, the drive had a height of only 25 mm, becoming the best option for use in laptops. Unfortunately, even as pioneers of the miniature HDD market, PrairieTek was unable to conquer the market by making a fatal strategic mistake. Having established the production of PT-220, they focused on further miniaturization, soon releasing the model PT-120, which, with the same capacity and speed characteristics, had a thickness of only 17 mm.


The 2.5-inch PrairieTek PT-120 second-generation hard drive The miscalculation

was that while PrairieTek engineers fought for every millimeter, competitors represented by JVC and Conner Peripherals were expanding the volume of hard drives, and this turned out to be decisive in such an unequal confrontation. Trying to catch the departing train, PrairieTek entered the arms race, having prepared the PT-240 model, which contained 42.8 MB of data and was characterized by record low energy consumption at that time - only 1.5 watts. But alas, even this did not save the company from ruin, and as a result, already in 1991 it ceased to exist.

The history of PrairieTek is yet another clear illustration of how technological advances, no matter how significant they may seem, due to their timeliness can simply be unclaimed by the market. In the early 90s, the consumer was not spoiled by ultrabooks and ultra-thin smartphones, so there was no acute need for such disks. It’s enough to recall the first GridPad tablet released by GRiD Systems Corporation in 1989: the “portable” device weighed more than 2 kg, and its thickness reached 3.6 cm!


GridPad - the first tablet in the world

And such a “baby” in those days was considered quite compact and convenient: the end user simply did not see anything better. At the same time, the issue of disk space was much more acute. The same GridPad, for example, did not have a hard drive at all: information was stored on the basis of RAM chips, the charge of which was supported by built-in batteries. Against the background of such devices, the Toshiba T100X (DynaPad) that appeared later appeared to be a real miracle because it carried a full-fledged 40 MB hard drive on board. The fact that the "mobile" device had a thickness of 4 centimeters, few people were embarrassed.


Toshiba T100X tablet, better known in Japan under the name DynaPad

But, as you know, the appetite comes with eating. Every year, user requests grew, and satisfying them became increasingly difficult. As the capacity and speed of storage media increased, more and more people began to think that mobile devices could be more compact, and the possibility of having at their disposal a portable drive capable of accommodating all the necessary files would come in handy . In other words, there was a demand on the market for devices fundamentally different in terms of convenience and ergonomics, which needed to be satisfied, and the confrontation of IT companies continued with renewed vigor.

Here it is worth again referring to today's epigraph. The era of solid-state drives began long before the zero: the first flash memory prototype was created by engineer Fujio Masuoka in the bowels of Toshiba Corporation back in 1984, and the first commercial product based on it in the face of Digipro FlashDisk appeared on the market in 1988. The miracle of technology contained 16 megabytes of data, and its price was $ 5,000.


Digipro FlashDisk - the first commercial SSD-drive The

new trend was supported by Digital Equipment Corporation, which introduced in the early 90's 5.25-inch devices of the EZ5x series with support for SCSI-1 and SCSI-2 interfaces. The Israeli company M-Systems, which announced in 1990 a family of solid-state drives called Fast Flash Disk (or FFD), already more or less reminiscent of modern ones, did not stand aside: SSDs had a format of 3.5 inches and could accommodate from 16 to 896 megabytes data. The first model, called the FFD-350, was released in 1995.


208 MB M-Systems FFD-350 - the prototype of modern SSDs

Unlike traditional hard drives, SSDs were much more compact, had higher performance and, most importantly, resistance to shock and strong vibration. Potentially, this made them almost ideal candidates for creating mobile drives, if not for one “but”: high prices for an information storage unit, which made such solutions practically unsuitable for the consumer market. They were popular in the corporate environment, used in aviation to create “black boxes”, installed in supercomputers of research centers, but there was no question of creating a retail product at that time: no one would buy them even if if any corporation decided to sell such drives at cost.

But market changes were not long in coming. The development of the consumer segment of removable SSD drives has been greatly facilitated by digital photography, because it was in this industry that there was an acute shortage of compact and energy-efficient storage media. Judge for yourself.

The world's first digital camera appeared (again, recall the words of Ecclesiastes) back in December 1975: it was invented by Stephen Sasson, an engineer at Eastman Kodak Company. The prototype consisted of several dozen printed circuit boards, an optical unit, borrowed from Kodak Super 8, and a tape recorder (photos were recorded on ordinary audio tapes). As a power source for the camera, 16 nickel-cadmium batteries were used, and all this good weighed 3.6 kg.


The first prototype digital camera created by Eastman Kodak Company The

resolution of the CCD matrix of such a “baby” was only 0.01 megapixels, which made it possible to obtain frames of 125 × 80 pixels, and it took 23 seconds to form each photo. Given such "impressive" characteristics, such a unit was losing on all fronts to traditional film SLRs, which means that creating a commercial product based on it could not be considered, although the invention was later recognized as one of the most important milestones in the history of photography, and Steve was officially inducted into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.

After 6 years, Sony seized the initiative from Kodak, announcing on August 25, 1981 a Mavica filmless video camera (the name is an abbreviation for Magnetic Video Camera).


The prototype of the Sony Mavica digital camera

The camera from the Japanese giant looked much more interesting: the prototype used a 10 by 12 mm CCD matrix and boasted a maximum resolution of 570 x 490 pixels, and recording was carried out on compact 2-inch Mavipack floppy disks, which were capable of accommodate from 25 to 50 frames depending on the shooting mode. The thing is that the formed frame consisted of two television fields, each of which was recorded as a composite video, and it was possible to fix both fields at once, and only one. In the latter case, the frame resolution dropped by 2 times, but such a photograph weighed half as much.

Sony originally planned to start mass production of the Mavica in 1983, and the retail price for the cameras was supposed to be $ 650. In practice, the first industrial designs appeared only in 1984, and the commercial implementation of the project in the person of the Mavica MVC-A7AF and Pro Mavica MVC-2000 was released only in 1986, and the cameras cost almost an order of magnitude more than originally planned.


Sony Pro Mavica MVC-2000 Digital Camera

Despite the fabulous price and innovation, calling the first Mavica the ideal solution for professional use did not turn the tongue, although in certain situations such cameras turned out to be an almost perfect solution. For example, CNN reporters used the Sony Pro Mavica MVC-5000 to cover Tiananmen Square on June 4. The improved model received two independent CCD arrays, one of which formed a luminance video signal, and the other a color-difference signal. This approach made it possible to abandon the use of the Bayer color filter and increase the horizontal resolution to 500 TVL. However, the main advantage of the camera was the support for direct connection to the PSC-6 module, which allows you to transfer the received pictures over the air directly to the editor.Thanks to this, CNN was the first to publish a report from the scene, and Sony subsequently even received a special Emmy Award for its contribution to the development of digital transmission of news photos.


Sony Pro Mavica MVC-5000 is the very camera that made Sony the winner of the Emmy Award.

But what if the photographer has a long trip away from civilization? In this case, he could take with him one of the wonderful Kodak DCS 100 cameras that saw the light in May 1991. A monster hybrid of a small format SLR camera Nikon F3 HP with a digital prefix DCS Digital Film Back, equipped with a vinder, was connected to an external Digital Storage Unit (it had to be worn on the shoulder strap) using a cable.


Kodak DCS 100 Digital Camera - the embodiment of compactness

Kodak offered two models, each of which had several variations: color DCS DC3 and black and white DCS DM3. All cameras of the line were equipped with matrices with a resolution of 1.3 megapixels, however, they differed in the size of the buffer, which determined the maximum allowable number of frames in serial shooting. For example, modifications with 8 MB on board could shoot at a speed of 2.5 frames per second in series of 6 frames, while the more advanced 32-megabyte frames allowed a series length of 24 frames. If this threshold is exceeded, the shooting speed drops to 1 frame in 2 seconds until the buffer is completely empty.

As for the DSU, it was equipped with a 3.5-inch 200 MB hard drive, capable of accommodating from 156 "raw" photos to 600 compressed using a hardware JPEG converter (bought and installed additionally), and an LCD display for view pictures. Smart storage even allowed adding brief descriptions to photos, but for this it was necessary to connect an external keyboard. Together with the batteries, its weight was 3.5 kg, while the total weight of the kit reached 5 kg.

Despite the dubious convenience and price from 20 to 25 thousand dollars (in the maximum configuration), over the next three years, about 1000 such devices were sold, which, in addition to journalists, were interested in medical institutions, the police and a number of industrial enterprises. In a word, the demand for such products was, as there was an urgent need for more miniature information carriers. A suitable solution was proposed by SanDisk, introducing the CompactFlash standard in 1994.


SanDisk-issued CompactFlash memory cards and PCMCIA adapter for connecting them to a PC The

new format has turned out to be so successful that it is successfully used at present, and the CompactFlash Association created in 1995 has more than 200 participating companies, including Canon , Eastman Kodak Company, Hewlett-Packard, Hitachi Global Systems Technologies, Lexar Media, Renesas Technology, Socket Communications and many others.

CompactFlash memory cards boasted overall dimensions of 42 mm by 36 mm and a thickness of 3.3 mm. The physical interface of the drives was essentially a truncated PCMCIA (50 pins instead of 68), which made it easy to connect such a card to the PCMCIA Type II expansion card slot using a passive adapter. Using the passive adapter, CompactFlash could exchange data with peripheral devices via IDE (ATA), and special active adapters allowed working with serial interfaces (USB, FireWire, SATA).

Despite the relatively small capacity (the first CompactFlash could accommodate only 2 MB of data), memory cards of this type were in demand in a professional environment due to their compactness and cost-effectiveness (one such drive consumed about 5% of energy compared to conventional 2.5-inch HDDs, which allowed to extend the battery life of the portable device) and versatility, which was achieved due to both support for many different interfaces, and the ability to work from a power source with a voltage of 3.3 or 5 volts, and most importantly - impressive resistance to overloads over 2000 g, which was almost unattainable bar for classic hard drives.

The thing is that it is technically impossible to create truly shockproof hard drives due to their design features. In the event of a fall, any object is subjected to kinetic effects of hundreds or even thousands of g (standard free fall acceleration of 9.8 m / s2) in less than 1 millisecond, which for classic HDDs is fraught with a number of very unpleasant consequences, including :

  • slipping and shifting magnetic plates;
  • the appearance of play in the bearings, their premature wear;
  • slap heads on the surface of the magnetic plates.

The most dangerous situation for the drive is the latter situation. When the impact energy is directed perpendicularly or at an insignificant angle to the horizontal plane of the HDD, the magnetic heads first deviate from their original position, and then sharply fall to the surface of the pancake, touching it with the edge, as a result of which the magnetic plate receives surface damage. Moreover, not only the place where the blow occurred (which, by the way, can be of considerable length if information was recorded or read at the time of the fall) suffers, but also the areas along which the microscopic fragments of the magnetic coating were scattered: being magnetized , they do not shift under the action of centrifugal force to the periphery, remaining on the surface of the magnetic plate,interfering with normal read / write operations and contributing to further damage to both the pancake and the writing head. If the blow is strong enough, this can completely lead to the detachment of the sensor and the complete failure of the drive.

In light of all of the above, for photojournalists, new drives were truly irreplaceable: it would be much better to have a dozen or two unpretentious cards with you than to carry a thing the size of a VCR behind your back, which will almost 100% fail from a little more powerful hit. However, memory cards were still too expensive for the retail consumer. That is why Sony successfully dominated the “soap box” market with the “cube” Mavica MVC-FD, which saved photos to standard 3.5-inch floppy disks formatted in DOS FAT12, which ensured compatibility with almost any PC of that time.


Amateur digital camera Sony Mavica MVC-FD73

And so it went on until almost the end of the decade, until IBM intervened in the matter. However, we will talk about this in the next article.

And what unusual devices have you encountered? Perhaps you happened to shoot on Mavica, to observe the agony of Iomega ZIP with your own eyes or to use the Toshiba T100X? Share your stories in the comments.

External data storage: from the time of IBM 1311 to the present day. Part 2

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