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At the end of a routine meeting with Toshiba, the engineers mentioned a new product they had in the lab that would be ready by that June. It was a tiny, 1.8-inc
by causi 4y ago
At the end of a routine meeting with Toshiba, the engineers mentioned a new product they had in the lab that would be ready by that June. It was a tiny, 1.8-inch drive (the size of a silver dollar) that would hold five gigabytes of storage (about a thousand songs), and they were not sure what to do with it.
Keep in mind that 1.8 inches was not remotely the smallest hard drive size at the time. The 1.3 inch Kittyhawk microdrive was released by HP in 1992, the 1-inch IBM microdrive in 340MB was released in 1999 and the 1GB in 2000.
- tambourine_man 4y agoCould any of them build at scale? Honest question. IBM has had 1nm transistors and etched their logo by manipulating individual atoms for years. And yet, if you want the best chips by the thousand/millions you run to TSMC
- causi 4y agoDefine scale. Microdrives were quite common at the time. I used one with a PCMCIA reader before the first iPod and a couple years later I had an MP3 player and a PDA with one. I recall being giddy at the fact I could keep a text copy of wikipedia in my pocket.
- foobiekr 4y agoThe IBM drive was commonly sold with early DSLRs like the Canon 10D. It was very common and routine. I am even aware of some products in the embedded space that used it.
- scarface74 4y agoApple couldn’t build at scale either and didn’t have to for the first couple of years. It took two years to sell the first million.