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Thursday 16 September 2010

What is it?

What is it, that is being loaded on the plane?

hard drive

Hint: Alan Turing would have liked this.

13 comments:

  1. Is it a drum drive?

    Now you have more storage on your phone.

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  2. Oh! Oh! Me Sir! Me Sir! An IBM 305 RAMAC
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_305_RAMAC

    Just over 100000 times smaller than my current one, about 4000 times more expensive!

    I like these, here's another teaser; answers on a postcard...
    http://i.imgur.com/KuHBx.jpg

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  3. Yup. That's the right answer. Go to the top of the class.

    It's a hard disk drive back in 1956... With 5 MB of storage. In September 1956 IBM launched the 305 RAMAC, the first 'SUPER' computer with a hard disk drive (HDD). The HDD weighed over a ton and stored a 'whopping' 5 MB of data.
    Do you appreciate your 4 GB memory stick a little more now?

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  4. Can you imagine trying to get one of those through security these days, they'd be going mental with those little sniffer devices...

    ...not even a squeak for the teaser I posted yet... :(

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  5. A Hard drive. Might have been a mite uncomfortable.

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  6. [to rapturous applause} We have a winner! Step forward sir and take a bow!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

    (hmm... first attempt didn't appear.)

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  7. Good thing it's not a Fastrand drum.

    Stan Kelly Bootle maintained that Engelbart originally called the computer mouse a 'vermiform appendix', for it's functional resemblance.

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  8. It's the same as my mouse. I must look for a newer one. Maybe one with two buttons.

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  9. Rubbish. It's the tea, coffee and refreshments trolley. Turing enjoyed a brew but disliked mucking about with kettles and loose-leaf tea. He therefore designed the first push-button computer-controlled drinks console only to find that it was handed over to the Americans who re-branded it "Automat" and claimed to have invented it.

    You had to put a programme card in the front with punch slots indicating tea/coffee/milk/sugar or not and a giant knitting needle would sort the pack, handing the instructions to an operator called Doris, who would make the drink as per the card.

    Three weeks later, after Doris had her veins seen to and returned swathed in leg bandages, you would receive a tepid cup of something you couldn't quite remember ordering.

    Although smaller now the basic design has not changed. You still get a drink which, as Douglas Adams observed, is not wholly but very nearly unlike what ever it was you ordered, but you get it a lot faster now.

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  10. Ah - I remember Doris.
    Except tht if you hold the mouse pointer over the image, it shows "Hard Drive" . . .

    Gadzooks FE, foiled? Ye good jest.

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  11. I wondered if someone would spot that?

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