Winchester disks reach for a gigabyte

Article Abstract:

Current Winchester drives store 760 megabytes in a space barely larger than a paperback book, and the limit has not been reached. A 5.25-inch hard disk works like a floppy disk drive; the read heads fly over the disk surface on an air layer a few millionths of an inch thick. The difference is the technology behind the black panel. Low-end drives of up to 40Mbytes of data lend themselves to high-volume, low-cost production. Higher capacity drives of almost 1Gigabyte are more costly. Capacity increases are achieved with more platters and more bit storage density on the platter, or by using a larger platter surface area. The ESDI interface introduced in 1982 allows data transfer rates to reach 10 megabytes per second. The new SCSI intelligent interface transfers data at up 12 megabytes per second, and is approaching a 32-megabit-sec rate.

Disk drives, Memory management, Data storage media, Communications protocols, Disk Storage, Storage Capacity, Data Transfer Rate

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Of mice and menus: designing the user-friendly interface

Article Abstract:

The evolution of the user-friendly graphical computer interface was a convergence of mice, windows, icons and menus, tempered in recent years by lawsuits regarding ownership of the last three. The modern user-friendly interface uses windows to handle multiple activities on screen, icons to symbolize those application and data files, menus for choosing actions and mice as pointers. The evolution of the windowed graphical interface as a whole begins with the 'Sketchpad' of Ivan Sutherland. Mice were first devised by Douglas Engelbart at SRI International (Menlo Park, CA) in 1964. Menus on demand only became possible with the advent of BitBlt and windows. The 'formalized' use of icons began with David Canfield Smith's work at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center in 1975. Details of the history of each technology are described.

Industrial research, Product development, Menus, Mice (Computer peripherals), Mouse, GUI, Graphical user interfaces, Computer history, Research and Development, User Interface, User interfaces (Computers), History of Computing, Windowing, Icons

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