[Allon]

Hello,

I am a student researching the rise of external hard drives. I Know that in the late 80's early 90's the external hard drive came about.

What I am having trouble figuring out is, which company first produced external hard drives for personal use and where can I find images of early external hard drives?

thanks

[coastie65]

Hi and welcome to the forums. I know that Commodore came out with an external Hard Drive for their 64 / 128 computers in the mid to late 80's. If I had to take a guess though, I would have to say that it was probably IBM as they were pretty much the leader in that kind of stuff at that time.


UPDATE: Maybe this will help: http://www.articlesb...ts-3388546.html

This post has been edited by coastie65: 13 July 2011 - 10:43 AM

[Tunz]

The very first hard drives, invented by IBM in 1956, were stand-alone external drives. The discs were 14" in diameter and the case was the size of a dishwasher.

[Tunz]

http://tinyurl.com/6b5jfe3

[LincolnSpector]

Hi, Allon, and welcome to the forums.

Although someone may have been making and selling them beforehand, external hard drives didn't really become part of the consumer market until USB 2.0 came out. Without checking the history (that's your job), I think that was about 10 years ago.

Before that, there are various other forms of external storage, usually with removable media that could be removed and reinserted into the drive like a CD or DVD. Iomega was the leading manufacturer of a lot of this stuff. They had something called a Bournulli <sp> Box, then the Zip drive.

Lincoln

[smax013]

LincolnSpector, on 14 July 2011 - 08:07 AM, said:

Although someone may have been making and selling them beforehand, external hard drives didn't really become part of the Windows consumer market until USB 2.0 came out.

Lincoln,

I made a slight modification to your statement.

On the Mac, SCSI based external hard drives (and optical drives) were around for quite a while before USB 1.0. While not nearly as prevalent as external drives are in today's world, they were definitely part of the Mac consumer market. I had an external SCSI hard drive for my Mac SE back in the late 80s/early 90s. And I had one with every Mac after that point (Mac IIsi, Mac 8400AV, and a Mac Performa 6500) until USB and Firewire killed SCSI on the Mac. Also had a external SCSI CD burner as well as external SCSI tape drives for backup. I believe that I still have the CD burner sitting around as well as at least one external SCSI drive...and maybe some a tape drive.

This was largely a function of the fact that the original Macs did not have internal parts that were designed to be replaced/upgraded like IBM PC XTs or ATs. So, the SCSI port was the way to add more hard drive space. And even though it became easier to upgrade the internal drive with the advent of the Mac II, external SCSI drives remained fairly prevalent in the Mac consumer world.

This post has been edited by smax013: 14 July 2011 - 11:07 AM

[Allon]

thanks for the help.


I have looked into the Mac external drives with the scsi connection. Lacie had a contract with mac to produce their external hard drives in the early 90's.

[coastie65]

The Old Commodore External Hdds, were connected by way of a serial port connection as far as I can remember. They did have an RS232 port and Parallel port too.

[LincolnSpector]

Thanks for the correction, Max. Not having been much of a Mac person, I'd forgotten about that. But now that you mention it, I do remember friends and co-wrokers' Mac with their big SCSI hard drives.

Lincoln

smax013, on 14 July 2011 - 11:05 AM, said:

LincolnSpector, on 14 July 2011 - 08:07 AM, said:

Although someone may have been making and selling them beforehand, external hard drives didn't really become part of the Windows consumer market until USB 2.0 came out.

Lincoln,

I made a slight modification to your statement.

On the Mac, SCSI based external hard drives (and optical drives) were around for quite a while before USB 1.0. While not nearly as prevalent as external drives are in today's world, they were definitely part of the Mac consumer market. I had an external SCSI hard drive for my Mac SE back in the late 80s/early 90s. And I had one with every Mac after that point (Mac IIsi, Mac 8400AV, and a Mac Performa 6500) until USB and Firewire killed SCSI on the Mac. Also had a external SCSI CD burner as well as external SCSI tape drives for backup. I believe that I still have the CD burner sitting around as well as at least one external SCSI drive...and maybe some a tape drive.

This was largely a function of the fact that the original Macs did not have internal parts that were designed to be replaced/upgraded like IBM PC XTs or ATs. So, the SCSI port was the way to add more hard drive space. And even though it became easier to upgrade the internal drive with the advent of the Mac II, external SCSI drives remained fairly prevalent in the Mac consumer world.

[smax013]

LincolnSpector, on 17 July 2011 - 10:39 AM, said:

Thanks for the correction, Max. Not having been much of a Mac person, I'd forgotten about that. But now that you mention it, I do remember friends and co-wrokers' Mac with their big SCSI hard drives.

Lincoln

Not to quibble (even though I like to do that <grin>) but I did not consider those SCSI drives all that big. The one(s) that I had were sized to sit under the Mac SE with the same foot print as a Mac SE (or Mac Plus, etc). And while there were bigger than today's drives, they also actually had "active cooling"...aka a fan in the case.