September 14th, 2023 at 12:01 a.m. by Henner Schröder – From Windows Me and the first hard drive – that happened on September 14th. Every day PC Games Hardware takes a look back into the young but eventful history of the computer.
…1956: IBM’s president calls this day the most important in the history of office technology: On September 14, 1956, IBM brought the first hard drive onto the market, the “350 Disk Storage Unit”, which was delivered as part of the new 305 RAMAC and 650 RAMAC computers. The drive, which at 172 centimeters high is the size of a cupboard, consists of fifty platters, each 60 centimeters in diameter, stores 4.4 megabytes and achieves a transfer rate of 8,800 bytes per second. Thanks to its high speed of 1,200 rpm, the device allows data access within one second – no comparison to the slow magnetic tapes that were previously used for mass storage. Only the hard drive makes it possible to process large amounts of data quickly; the technology soon becomes established and is still in use 50 years later – albeit with higher capacity.
…2000: Windows 2000 with its modern NT technology is not yet ready for the masses – at least that’s how Microsoft sees it and brings Windows Millennium Edition (Me) onto the market on September 14, 2000. The new operating system is basically still based on the old DOS kernel with its 16-bit technology, but hides it as best as possible under the modernized interface – even more so than its predecessors 95 and 98. Windows Me, however, will not become one great success, many users skip this short-term interim version and switch from Windows 98 to the much more stable Windows XP a year later. In keeping with the topic, take a look at our gallery Operating systems through the ages: From OS/360 to Windows 7.
