Hasithah Blog Posts

• Happy New Year
  on Dec 31, 2012
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• Apple Gets Into The Mouse Game
  on Dec 6, 2012 in History of the computer mouse
  Around the same period, Steve Jobs was also looking for an innovative input system for his forthcoming Apple systems, and considered the mouse to be just it. For this reason, he commissioned design firm Hovey-Kelley to create an inexpensive, mass...
• The “ball mouse” and Xerox
  on Oct 21, 2012
  Although it was Engelbart who first developed the mouse, his former colleague, Bill English, was the one who took forward its development. Hence, while working in 1972 for Xerox in its already famous Palo Alto Research Park, English and Jack Hawley r...
• The B.X. (Before Xerox) Era
  on Sep 11, 2012 in History of the computer mouse
  Most people tend to associate the invention of the mouse with Xerox and its research park. In fact, the first functional mouse was actually demonstrated by Douglas Engelbart, a researcher from the Stanford Research Institute, back in 1963. The respec...
• Computer Mouse
  on Aug 20, 2012 in History of the computer mouse
  A mouse is a pointing device that functions by detecting two-dimensional motion relative to its supporting surface. Physically, a mouse consists of an object held under one of the user's hands, with one or more buttons.The mouse sometimes features ot...
• 3½ Inch Format
  on Apr 19, 2012 in History of the floppy disk
  Sony introduced their own small-format 90.0 mm × 94.0 mm disk, similar to the others but somewhat simpler in construction than the AmDisk 3-inch floppy. The first computer to use this format was Sony's SMC 70 of 1982. Other than Hewlett-Packard's HP...
• Mitsumi's "Quick Disk" 3-inch floppies
  on Apr 3, 2012 in History of the floppy disk
  Another 3-inch format was Mitsumi's Quick Disk format. The Quick Disk format is referred to in various size references: 2.8-inch, 3-inch×3-inch and 3-inch×4-inch. Mitsumi offered this as OEM equipment, expecting their VAR customers to customize the...
• The 3-inch compact floppy disk
  on Mar 20, 2012 in History of the floppy disk
  Throughout the early 1980s the limitations of the 5¼-inch format were starting to become clear. Originally designed to be smaller and more practical than the 8-inch format, the 5¼-inch system was itself too large, and as the quality of the recordin...
• The "Twiggy" disk
  on Mar 7, 2012 in History of the floppy disk
  In the early '80s, Apple fell victim to a serious case of NIH Syndrome (NotInvented Here), and decided to manufacture their own disk drives. Not contentto be industry compatible, instead they designed what they believed to beleading-edge drives: th...
• The 5¼-inch mini floppy
  on Feb 29, 2012 in History of the floppy disk
  In a 1976 meeting, An Wang of Wang Laboratories informed Shugart Associates' Jim Adkinson and Don Massaro, that the 8-inch format was simply too large for the desktop word processing machines he was developing at the time. Adkinson and Massaro propos...
• The 8-inch disk
  on Jan 4, 2012 in History of the floppy disk
  In 1967, IBM gave their San Jose, California storage development center a task to develop a reliable and inexpensive system for loading microcode into their System/370 mainframes in a process called Initial Control Program Load (ICPL). The System/370...
• Merry Christmas
  on Dec 24, 2011
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• 1950s - 1970s
  on Oct 9, 2011 in History of hard disk drives
  The IBM 350 Disk File, invented by Reynold Johnson, was introduced in 1956 with the IBM 305 RAMAC computer. This drive had fifty 24 inch platters, with a total capacity of five million characters A single head assembly having two heads was used...
• IBM 3390 direct access storage device
  on Aug 23, 2011 in History of hard disk drives
  Models A14, A18, B14, B18, B1C, A24, A28, B24, B28 and B2C announced November 14, 1989 Model 3 announced September 11, 1991...
• IBM 3380
  on Jun 29, 2011 in History of hard disk drives
  The IBM 3380 Direct Access Storage Device was introduced in June 1980. It used new film head technology and had a capacity of 2.52 gigabytes with a data transfer rate of 3 megabytes per second. Average access time was 16 ms. Purchase price at time...
• IBM 3370 direct access storage device
  on May 22, 2011 in History of hard disk drives
  IBM 3370 Direct Access Storage DeviceModels A1, B1, A11, and B11 announced January 30, 1979 and withdrawn August 5, 1986 Models A2, B2, A12 and B12 announced September 15, 1983The IBM 3370 of 1979 introduced thin-film head technology to large disk f...
• IBM 3350 direct access storage
  on Apr 23, 2011 in History of hard disk drives
  Models A2, A2F, B2 & B2F announced July 15, 1975 and withdrawn September 5, 1994 Models C2 and C2F announced November 4, 1975 and withdrawn September 5, 1994Known during its development as...
• IBM 3340
  on Apr 15, 2011 in History of hard disk drives
  Models A2, B1 and B2 announced March 13, 1973 Models B1 and C2 withdrawn December 20, 1983 Models A2 & B2 withdrawn May 1, 1984Following a development effort that began in the summer of 1969, the IBM 3340 disk unit was introduced in March 1973...
• IBM 3330
  on Apr 8, 2011 in History of hard disk drives
  The IBM 3330 Direct Access Storage Facility, code-named Merlin, was introduced in June 1970 for use with the IBM System/370 and the IBM System 360/195. Its removable disk packs held 100 MB (404x19x13,030 bytes) (the 1973 Model 11 featured IBM 3336-11...
• IBM 2310
  on Mar 29, 2011 in History of hard disk drives
  The IBM 2310 Removable Cartridge Drive was announced in 1964 with the IBM 1800 and then in 1965 with the IBM 1130; it likely first shipped with the 1130 in late 1965.It could store 512,000 words (1,024,000 bytes) on an IBM 2315 cartridge. A single 1...