What has been will be;
and what has been done will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.
Book of Ecclesiastes 1:9
The eternal wisdom contained in the epigraph is applicable to almost any industry, including such a rapidly changing one as IT. In fact, it turns out that many of the know-how that are only now starting to be talked about are based on inventions made several decades ago and even successfully (or not so successfully) used in consumer devices or in the B2B sphere. This also applies to such a seemingly new-fangled trend as mobile gadgets and portable storage media, which we will discuss in detail in today’s material.
You don't have to look far for examples. Take the same mobile phones. If you think that the first “smart” device that did not have a keyboard completely was the iPhone, which appeared only in 2007, then you are deeply mistaken. The idea of creating a real smartphone, combining a communication tool and the capabilities of a PDA in a single case, belongs not to Apple, but to IBM, and the first such device was presented to the general public on November 23, 1992 as part of the COMDEX exhibition of achievements in the telecommunications industry, held in Las Vegas , and this miracle of technology entered mass production already in 1994.
IBM Simon Personal Communicator - the world's first touchscreen smartphone
The IBM Simon personal communicator was the first mobile phone that basically did not have a keyboard, and information was entered exclusively using a touch screen. At the same time, the gadget combined the functionality of an 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, entering text information was implemented in a rather ingenious way: the owner had a choice between a miniature QWERTY keyboard, which, given the display size of 4,7 inches and a resolution of 160x293 pixels, was not particularly convenient to use, and the PredictaKey intelligent assistant. The latter displayed only the next 6 characters, which, according to the predictive algorithm, could be used with the greatest probability.
The best epithet that can be used to characterize the IBM Simon is “ahead of its 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 around a device measuring 200x64x38 mm and weighing 623 grams (and together with the 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 is: $899 with a contract from the cellular operator BellSouth, which has become an official partner of IBM in the USA, and over $1000 without it. Also, do not forget about the opportunity (or rather even the need) to purchase a more capacious battery - “only” for $78.
Visual comparison of IBM Simon, modern smartphones and a fir cone
With external storage devices, things are also not so simple. According to the Hamburg account, the creation of the first such device can again be attributed to IBM. On October 11, 1962, the corporation announced the revolutionary IBM 1311 data storage system. The key feature of the new product was the use of replaceable cartridges, each of which contained six 14-inch magnetic plates. Although this removable drive weighed 4,5 kilograms, it was still an important achievement, since at least it was possible to change cartridges when full and transfer them between installations, 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 we had to pay for it in performance and capacity. Firstly, in order to prevent data damage, the outer sides of the 1st and 6th plates were stripped of the magnetic layer, and they also 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 at that time was still quite a lot: one cartridge successfully replaced ⅕ of a standard reel of magnetic film or 25 thousand punched cards, while providing random access to data.
Secondly, the price for mobility was a decrease in performance: the spindle speed had to be reduced to 1500 rpm, and as a result, the average sector access time increased to 250 milliseconds. For comparison, the predecessor of this device, the IBM 1301, had a spindle speed of 1800 rpm and a sector access time of 180 ms. However, it was thanks to the use of removable hard drives that the IBM 1311 became very popular in the corporate environment, since this design ultimately made it possible to significantly reduce the cost of storing a unit of information, making it possible to reduce the number of purchased installations and the area required to accommodate them. Thanks to this, the device turned out to be one of the longest-lived by the standards of the computer hardware market and was discontinued only in 1975.
The successor to the IBM 1311, which received the index 3340, was the result of the development of ideas incorporated by the corporation's engineers into 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 improve the aerodynamics inside the cassettes. The picture was complemented by a 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 the sector access time decreased exactly 10 times - to 25 milliseconds. At the same time, the data transfer speed reached a record for that time of 885 kilobytes per second. By the way, it was thanks to the IBM 3340 that the jargon “Winchester” came into use. The fact is that the device was designed for simultaneous operation with two removable drives, which is why it received the additional index “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 - about the bullet caliber (0,3 inches) and the weight of gunpowder in the capsule (30 grains, that is, about 1,94 grams).
Floppy Disk - the prototype of modern external drives
Although it is the cartridges for the IBM 1311 that can be considered the great-great-great-grandfathers of modern external hard drives, these devices were still infinitely far from the consumer market. But in order to continue the family tree of mobile storage media, you first need to decide on the selection criteria. Obviously, punched cards will be left behind, since they are a technology of the “pre-disk” era. It is also hardly worth considering drives based on magnetic tapes: although formally the reel has such a property as mobility, its performance cannot be compared even with the first examples of hard drives for the simple reason that magnetic tape provides only sequential access to the recorded data. Thus, “soft” drives are closest to hard drives in terms of consumer properties. And it’s true: floppy disks are quite compact, but, like hard drives, they can withstand repeated rewriting and are capable of operating 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 IBM laboratories that Alan Shugart's research group was looking for a worthy replacement for magnetic tapes, which were great for archiving data, but were inferior to hard drives in everyday tasks. A suitable solution was proposed by senior engineer David Noble, who joined the team, and in 1967 he designed a removable magnetic disk with a protective casing, which was operated using a special disk drive. 4 years later, IBM introduced the world's first floppy disk, which had a capacity of 80 kilobytes and a diameter of 8 inches, and already in 1972 the second generation of floppy disks was released, the capacity of which was already 128 kilobytes.
IBM 8-inch floppy disk with a capacity of 128 kilobytes
In the wake of the success of floppy disks, already in 1973, Alan Shugart decided to leave the corporation and found his own company, called Shugart Associates. The new enterprise began to further improve floppy drives: in 1976, the company introduced 5,25-inch compact floppy disks and original floppy drives, which received an updated controller and interface. The cost of the Shugart SA-400 mini-floppy at the start of sales was $390 for the drive itself and $45 for a set of ten floppy disks. In the entire history of the company, it was the SA-400 that became the most successful product: the rate of shipment of new devices reached 4000 units per day, and gradually 5,25-inch floppy disks forced out their bulky eight-inch counterparts from the market.
However, Alan Shugart’s company was not able to dominate the market for long: already in 1981, Sony took the baton, introducing an even smaller floppy disk, the diameter of which was only 90 mm, or 3,5 inches. The first PC to use a built-in disk drive of the new format was the HP-150, released by Hewlett-Packard in 1984.
The first personal computer with a 3,5-inch disk drive Hewlett-Packard HP-150
Sony's floppy disk turned out to be so successful that it quickly replaced all 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 flap provided reliable protection for the disk itself;
- due to the presence of a metal sleeve with a hole for correct positioning, there was no need to make a hole directly in the magnetic disk, which also had a beneficial effect on its safety;
- using a sliding switch, overwrite protection was implemented (previously, in order to block the possibility of repeated recording, the control cutout on the floppy disk had to be sealed with tape).
Timeless classic - Sony 3,5-inch floppy disk
Along with compactness, 3,5-inch floppy disks also had a much higher capacity compared to their predecessors. Thus, 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 in this regard identical to 5-inch quadruple-density floppy disks, already in 1987 high-density 1,44 MB floppy disks appeared, and in 1991 - extended density floppy disks, accommodating 2,88 ,XNUMX MB of data.
Some companies attempted to create even smaller 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 never caught on. But external devices began to appear on the market, which were ideologically much closer to modern external drives.
Iomega's Bernoulli box and the ominous "death clicks"
Whatever one may say, the volumes of floppy disks were too small to store sufficiently 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 due to, without exaggeration, its gigantic dimensions: “floppy disks” from Iomega had dimensions of 21 by 27,5 cm, which identical to a sheet of A4 paper.
This is what the original cartridges for the Bernoulli box looked like
The company's devices have gained popularity since the Bernoulli Box II. The dimensions of the drives were 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 featuring a much more impressive capacity : from 20 MB for entry-line models to 230 MB for drives that went on sale in 1993. Such devices were available in two formats: as internal modules for PCs (thanks 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 a SCSI interface.
Second generation Bernoulli box
The direct successors of Bernoulli's box were the Iomega ZIP, introduced by the company in 1994. Their popularization was greatly facilitated by partnerships with Dell and Apple, which began installing ZIP drives in their computers. The first model, ZIP-100, used drives with a capacity of 100 bytes (about 663 MB), boasted a data transfer speed of about 296 MB/s and a random access time of no more than 96 milliseconds, and external drives could be connected to a PC via an LPT or SCSI. Somewhat later, ZIP-1 with a capacity of 28 bytes (250 MB) appeared, and at the end of the series - ZIP-250, which are backward compatible with ZIP-640 drives and support work with ZIP-384 in legacy mode (from outdated drives it was only possible read information). By the way, external flagships even managed to receive support for USB 239 and FireWire.
Iomega ZIP-100 external drive
With the advent of CD-R/RW, Iomega’s creations naturally sank into oblivion - sales of devices began to decline, having decreased almost fourfold by 2003, and already completely disappeared in 2007 (although the liquidation of production took place only in 2010) . Things might have turned out differently if ZIP hadn't had certain reliability issues.
The thing is that the devices’ performance, impressive for those years, was ensured by a record RPM: the floppy disk rotated at a speed of 3000 rpm! You've probably 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 write head and its surface accelerated, the air pressure dropped, as a result of which the disk moved closer to the sensor (Bernoulli's law in action). Theoretically, this feature should have made the device more reliable, but in practice, consumers were faced with such an unpleasant phenomenon as Clicks of Death. Any, even the smallest, burr on a magnetic plate moving at enormous speed could irreversibly damage the write head, after which the drive would park the actuator and repeat the reading attempt, which was accompanied by characteristic clicks. Such a malfunction was “contagious”: if the user did not immediately get his bearings and inserted another floppy disk into the damaged device, then after a couple of reading attempts it also became unusable, since the write head with a broken geometry itself damaged the surface of the floppy disk. At the same time, a floppy disk with burrs could immediately “kill” another reader. Therefore, those who worked with Iomega products had to carefully check the serviceability of floppy disks, and on later models even corresponding warning labels appeared.
Magneto-optical discs: HAMR retro style
Finally, if we are already talking about portable storage media, we cannot fail to mention such a miracle of technology as magneto-optical disks (MO). The first devices of this class appeared in the early 80s of the 1988th century, but they became most widespread only in 256, when NeXT introduced its first PC called NeXT Computer, which was equipped with a magneto-optical drive manufactured by Canon and supported work with disks with a capacity of XNUMX MB.
NeXT Computer - 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 thermomagnetic recording technology (HAMR) has been actively discussed only in recent years, this approach was successfully used in MO 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 exposure to an external magnetic field. During recording, the surface of the plate was preheated by a laser to the temperature of the Curie point, after which a magnetic head located on the back side of the disk changed the magnetization of the corresponding area.
The key difference between this approach and HAMR was that 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 the sensor, which recorded the change in 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 an optical material in proportion to the square of the electromagnetic field strength.
The principle of reading and writing information on 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 support multiple writes. The rewriting was carried out in three passes: first, the information was erased from the disk, then the recording itself was carried out, after which the data integrity was checked. This approach ensured guaranteed recording quality, which made MOs even more reliable than CDs and DVDs. And unlike floppy disks, magneto-optical media were practically not subject to demagnetization: according to manufacturers' estimates, the storage time of data on rewritable MOs is at least 50 years.
Already in 1989, double-sided 5,25-inch drives with a capacity of 650 MB appeared on the market, providing read speeds of up to 1 MB/s and random access times from 50 to 100 ms. At the end of the popularity of MO, one could find models on the market that could hold up to 9,1 GB of data. However, compact 90 mm disks with capacities from 128 to 640 MB are most widely used.
Compact 640 MB magneto-optical drive from 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 ZIPs was support for 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 MO was 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 formatting features. In turn, high power consumption and the need for an additional cooling system limited the use of such drives in laptops. Finally, a three-fold cycle significantly increased the recording time, and this problem was solved only by 1997 with the advent of LIMDOW (Light Intensity Modulated Direct Overwrite) technology, which combined the first two stages into one by adding magnets built into the disc cartridge, which carried out erasing information. As a result, magneto-optics gradually lost relevance even in the field of long-term data storage, giving way to classic LTO streamers.
And I'm always missing something...
Everything stated above clearly illustrates the simple fact that no matter how ingenious an invention may be, it, among other things, must be timely. IBM Simon was doomed to failure, since at the time of its appearance people did not need absolute mobility. Magneto-optical disks became a good alternative to HDDs, but remained the lot of professionals and enthusiasts, since at that time speed, convenience and, of course, low cost were much more important to the mass consumer, for which the average buyer was ready to sacrifice reliability. Those same ZIPs, despite all their advantages, were never able to become truly mainstream due to the fact that people didn’t really want to look at each floppy disk under a magnifying glass, looking for burrs.
That is why natural selection ultimately clearly demarcated the market into two parallel areas: removable storage media (CD, DVD, Blu-Ray), flash drives (for storing small amounts of data) and external hard drives (for large amounts). Among the latter, compact 2,5-inch models in individual cases have become the unspoken standard, the appearance of which we owe primarily to laptops. Another reason for their popularity is their cost-effectiveness: if classic 3,5-inch HDDs in an external case could hardly be called “portable”, and they necessarily required connecting an additional power source (which means you still had to carry an adapter with you), then the most that 2,5-inch drives could need was an additional USB connector, and later and energy-efficient models did not require even this.
By the way, we owe the appearance of miniature HDDs to PrairieTek, a small company founded by Terry Johnson in 1986. Just three years after its discovery, PrairieTek introduced the world's first 2,5-inch hard drive with a capacity of 20 MB, called the PT-220. 30% more compact compared to desktop solutions, the drive had a height of only 25 mm, becoming the optimal option for use in laptops. Unfortunately, even as pioneers of the miniature HDD market, PrairieTek were never able to conquer the market, making a fatal strategic mistake. Having established production of the PT-220, they focused their efforts on further miniaturization, soon releasing the PT-120 model, which, with the same capacity and speed characteristics, had a thickness of only 17 mm.
2,5-inch second generation PrairieTek PT-120 hard drive
The miscalculation was that while PrairieTek engineers were fighting for every millimeter, competitors such as JVC and Conner Peripherals were increasing the volume of hard drives, and this turned out to be decisive in such an unequal confrontation. Trying to catch the train, PrairieTek entered the arms race, preparing the PT-240 model, which contained 42,8 MB of data and had a record low power consumption for that time - only 1,5 W. But alas, even this did not save the company from ruin, and as a result, already in 1991 it ceased to exist.
The story of PrairieTek is another clear illustration of how technological advances, no matter how significant they may seem, can simply be unclaimed by the market due to their untimeliness. In the early 90s, consumers were not yet spoiled by ultrabooks and ultra-thin smartphones, so there was no urgent need for such drives. Suffice it 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 world's first tablet
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 pressing. The same GridPad, for example, did not have a hard drive at all: information storage was implemented on the basis of RAM chips, the charge of which was maintained by built-in batteries. Compared to similar devices, the Toshiba T100X (DynaPad) that appeared later looked like a real miracle due to the fact that it carried a full-fledged 40 MB hard drive on board. The fact that the “mobile” device was 4 centimeters thick did not bother anyone.
Toshiba T100X tablet, better known in Japan as DynaPad
But, as you know, appetite comes with eating. Every year, user requests grew, and it became more and more difficult to satisfy them. 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 ability to have at their disposal a portable drive that could accommodate all the necessary files would come in handy . In other words, there was a demand on the market for devices that were fundamentally different in terms of convenience and ergonomics, which had to be satisfied, and the confrontation between IT companies continued with renewed vigor.
Here it is worth revisiting today’s epigraph. The era of solid-state drives began long before the 1984s: the first prototype of flash memory was created by engineer Fujio Masuoka at the Toshiba Corporation back in 1988, and the first commercial product based on it, the Digipro FlashDisk, appeared on the market already in 16. The technological miracle contained 5000 megabytes of data, and its price was $XNUMX.
Digipro FlashDisk - the first commercial SSD drive
The new trend was supported by Digital Equipment Corporation, which introduced 90-inch EZ5,25x series devices with support for SCSI-5 and SCSI-1 interfaces in the early 2s. The Israeli company M-Systems did not stand aside, announcing in 1990 a family of solid-state drives called Fast Flash Disk (or FFD), which were more or less reminiscent of modern ones: SSDs had a 3,5-inch format and could hold from 16 to 896 megabytes data. The first model, called FFD-350, was released in 1995.
M-Systems FFD-350 208 MB - the prototype of modern SSDs
Unlike traditional hard drives, SSDs were much more compact, had higher performance and, most importantly, were resistant to shock and strong vibration. Potentially, this made them almost ideal candidates for creating mobile storage devices, if not for one “but”: high prices per unit of information storage, which is why such solutions turned out to be practically unsuitable for the consumer market. They were popular in the corporate environment, were used in aviation to create “black boxes,” and were installed in supercomputers of research centers, but creating a retail product at that time was out of the question: 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 was 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 (remembering the words of Ecclesiastes) back in December 1975: it was invented by Stephen Sasson, an engineer at the 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 cassettes). 16 nickel-cadmium batteries were used as a power source for the camera, and the whole thing weighed 3,6 kg.
The first digital camera prototype created by the Eastman Kodak Company
The resolution of the CCD matrix of this “baby” was only 0,01 megapixels, which made it possible to obtain frames of 125 × 80 pixels, and each photo took 23 seconds to form. Taking into account such “impressive” characteristics, such a unit was inferior to traditional film SLRs on all fronts, which means that creating a commercial product based on it was out of the question, although the invention was later recognized as one of the most important milestones in the history of the development of photography, and Steve was officially inducted into the Consumer Electronics Hall of Fame.
6 years later, Sony took over the initiative from Kodak, announcing on August 25, 1981 the filmless video camera Mavica (the name is an abbreviation for Magnetic Video Camera).
A prototype of a 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 holding from 25 to 50 frames depending on the shooting mode. The thing is that the frame being formed consisted of two television fields, each of which was recorded as a composite video, and it was possible to record both fields at once, or only one. In the latter case, the frame resolution dropped by 2 times, but such a photograph weighed half as much.
Sony initially planned to begin 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 form of Mavica MVC-A7AF and Pro Mavica MVC-2000 saw the light only in 1986, and the cameras cost almost an order of magnitude more than originally planned.
Digital camera Sony Pro Mavica MVC-2000
Despite the fabulous price and innovation, it was hard to call the first Mavica an ideal solution for professional use, although in certain situations such cameras turned out to be an almost ideal solution. For example, CNN reporters used the Sony Pro Mavica MVC-5000 when covering the June 4 events in Tiananmen Square. The improved model received two independent CCD matrices, one of which generated a luminance video signal, and the other – a color difference signal. This approach made it possible to abandon the use of a Bayer color filter and increase the horizontal resolution to 500 TVL. However, the main advantage of the camera was its support for direct connection to the PSC-6 module, which allows you to transmit received images via radio directly to the editorial office. It was thanks to this that CNN was able to be 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 photographs.
Sony Pro Mavica MVC-5000 - the same camera that made Sony an Emmy Award winner
But what if the photographer has a long business trip away from civilization? In this case, he could take with him one of the wonderful Kodak DCS 100 cameras, which were released in May 1991. A monstrous hybrid of a small-format Nikon F3 HP SLR camera with a DCS Digital Film Back digital set-top box equipped with a winder, it was connected to an external Digital Storage Unit (it had to be worn on a shoulder strap) using a cable.
Kodak DCS 100 digital camera is the embodiment of “compactness”
Kodak offered two models, each of which had several variations: the color DCS DC3 and the black-and-white DCS DM3. All cameras in the line were equipped with matrices with a resolution of 1,3 megapixels, but differed in the size of the buffer, which determined the maximum allowable number of frames during continuous 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, and more advanced, 32 MB, allowed a series length of 24 frames. If this threshold was exceeded, the shooting speed dropped to 1 frame per 2 seconds until the buffer was completely cleared.
As for the DSU unit, it was equipped with a 3,5-inch 200 MB hard drive, capable of storing from 156 “raw” photos to 600 compressed using a hardware JPEG converter (purchased and installed additionally), and an LCD display for viewing pictures. Smart Storage even allowed you to add short descriptions to photos, but this required connecting an external keyboard. Together with 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), about 1000 similar devices were sold over the next three years, which, in addition to journalists, interested medical institutions, police and a number of industrial enterprises. In a word, there was a demand for such products, as well as an urgent need for more miniature storage media. SanDisk offered a suitable solution when it introduced the CompactFlash standard in 1994.
CompactFlash memory cards manufactured by SanDisk and a PCMCIA adapter for connecting them to a PC
The new format turned out to be so successful that it is successfully used today, and the CompactFlash Association, created in 1995, currently 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 with a thickness of 3,3 mm. The physical interface of the drives was essentially a stripped-down PCMCIA (50 pins instead of 68), thanks to which such a card could be easily connected to the PCMCIA Type II expansion card slot using a passive adapter. Using, again, a passive adapter, CompactFlash could exchange data with peripheral devices via IDE (ATA), and special active adapters made it possible to work with serial interfaces (USB, FireWire, SATA).
Despite the relatively small capacity (the first CompactFlash could hold only 2 MB of data), memory cards of this type were in demand in a professional environment due to their compactness and efficiency (one such drive consumed about 5% of electricity compared to conventional 2,5-inch HDDs, which made it possible to extend the battery life of a portable device) and versatility, which was achieved through both support for many different interfaces and the ability to operate 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 an almost unattainable bar for classic hard drives.
The thing is that it is technically impossible to create truly shock-resistant hard drives due to their design features. When falling, any object is subjected to a kinetic impact of hundreds or even thousands of g (standard acceleration due to gravity equal to 9,8 m/s2) in less than 1 millisecond, which for classic HDDs is fraught with a number of very unpleasant consequences, among which it is necessary to highlight :
- slipping and displacement of magnetic plates;
- the appearance of play in bearings, their premature wear;
- the slap of the heads on the surface of the magnetic plates.
The last situation is the most dangerous for the drive. When the impact energy is directed perpendicularly or at a slight angle to the horizontal plane of the HDD, the magnetic heads first deviate from their original position and then sharply lower towards 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 impact occurred suffers (which, by the way, can have a significant extent if information was being recorded or read at the time of the fall), but also the areas where 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 itself and the write head. If the impact is strong enough, this can even lead to the sensor being torn off and the drive completely failing.
In light of all of the above, for photo reporters the new drives were truly irreplaceable: it is much better to have a dozen or two unpretentious cards with you than to carry a thing the size of a VCR on your back, which is almost 100% likely to fail from the slightest force blow. However, memory cards were still too expensive for the retail consumer. That is why Sony successfully dominated the point-and-shoot market with the Mavica MVC-FD cube, which saved photos to standard 3,5-inch floppy disks formatted in DOS FAT12, which ensured compatibility with almost any PC of the time.
Amateur digital camera Sony Mavica MVC-FD73
And this continued almost until the end of the decade, until IBM intervened. However, we will talk about this in the next article.
What unusual devices have you come across? Perhaps you had a chance to shoot on a Mavica, watch the agony of an Iomega ZIP with your own eyes, or use a Toshiba T100X? Share your stories in the comments.
Source: habr.com