IBM waves goodbye to Winchester hard files

BIG BLUE SAID it has completed the transfer of its hard drive division to Hitachi. It closed the deal to sell its hard drive related businesses for $2.05 billion yesterday, with Hitachi coughing up 70 per cent of this money to IBM yesterday. It will pay IBM the rest of the money over a three year period. It is the end of an era. IBM pioneered hard drives with the Winchester technology and insisted on calling the devices "hard files" until very recently indeed.

IBM started the '70s with the invention of the floppy disk. To this day, floppy disks are widely used as the most common "interchange" media to transfer data between systems. The discovery of rare-earth materials as a suitable medium for rewritable optical media by IBM engineers, together with the diode laser invented previously, started the era of rewritable optical recording devices.

Another significant technology was the "Winchester" hard disk drive, a significant innovation in disk drive configuration, capacity, and performance. This remained the industry trend for the next decade. Other significant innovations included RAID, which uses redundant arrays of disks to increase reliability, and the Hierarchical Storage Manager (HSM), which allows migration of inactive data from disks to less expensive media.