[Richard Crowley]

"Keith G" wrote ...
"Arny Krueger" wrote
In 1972 I was an EE undergraduate student, working on a hybrid computer,
which was composed of an analog computer, a pair of A/D & D/A converters,
and a small digital computer. The A/D - D/A pair was speced to have
true 16 bits monotonicity and accuracy, and a max 200 KHz conversion
rate. Price was said to be around $500,000. The digital computer had 32k
bytes of RAM and an approx 1 Megabyte hard drive. The price was in the
same range.

Hard drive?

At exactly that time, my (late) father-in-law was a Systems Engineer on
what was then Europe's largest 'hybrid' digital/analog computer at BAC,
Stevenage. It had 8K of Ram and the only storage medium I ever go to hear
about was tapes...??

In 1967-69 I was studying CS at a regional junior college and we
had an IBM 1401 with four hard drives (with the removable "paks"
of discs), and an IBM 1620 with two more hard drives. While I was
there they upgraded the 1401 to a new System360 with at least 8
hard drives (sealed "Winchester" drives, the 12-inch equivalent of
what we use today.) And a whopping 256K of memory. Still used
a Hollerith ("IBM") card reader for student job input.

Curious that back then we had 12 and 16 inch hard drives and
2 inch silicon wafers. And today we have 2 inch (and even 1 inch)
hard drives and 12 inch (300mm) and 18 inch (450mm) wafers.
:-)