Numbers, please! 30-30 Winchester: Hard disk standard from mainframe to IBM PC

50 years ago, the IT trade press was thrilled: “The real Winchester has arrived” rejoiced the US American Computerworld. The German sister publication was delighted that “files and operating systems can now be stored in the most economical form”. This refers to the IBM 3350 hard disk for the System /370 Model 115 entry-level computers, with which the name Winchester for hard disks became the generic name for all hard disks of this type. A success story.

What do Aspen, Merlin, Iceberg, Winchester, Apollo, and Midas have in common? They are code names that IBM used in its Californian research laboratory in San José for the top-secret development of hard disks. In the 1970s, it was the data carriers that brought in the biggest sales and profits at IBM and, like Midas, proved to be pure gold. After starting out with the first RAMAC disk station, the engineers continuously tinkered with new models and protected them with code names.

Zahlen, bitte!

In this section, we present amazing, impressive, informative and funny figures ("Zahlen") from the fields of IT, science, art, business, politics and, of course, mathematics every Tuesday. The wordplay "Zahlen, bitte!" for a section about numbers is based on the ambiguity of the German word "Zahlen." On one hand, "Zahlen" can be understood as a noun in the sense of digits and numerical values, which fits the theme of the section. On the other hand, the phrase "Zahlen, bitte!" is reminiscent of a waiter's request in a restaurant or bar when they are asked to bring the bill. Through this association, the section acquires a playful and slightly humorous undertone that catches the readers' attention and makes them curious about the presented numbers and facts.

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Some of them had to do with technology. Merlin, that, was the great magician who made the read and write heads hover over the magnetic disks with a magic spell. Under the name IBM 3330 (PDF), a very successful system was created which, according to the designer Al Shugart, was one of the four most important steps in the development of hard disk technology.

Favorable hard disk size determined via study

For the successor model, a market research company was initially commissioned to carry out a study on inexpensive entry-level systems. It determined that a system with two disk spindles of 30 megabytes each would be well received on the market. When Ken Haughton, head of development at the time, found this proposal on his desk after a hunting trip and read 30-30, he promptly had the code name Winchester at the ready, as he remembered in a conversation about the development of the IBM 3340 and 3350 (PDF file).

Whether he was thinking of the .30-30 Win hunting ammunition or the Winchester rifle is not known. (In a completely different field, the Mexican Tequila 30-30 is a tribute to Pancho Villa's Winchester rifle).

In the end, IBM offered the 3340 in different sizes in 1973, once the entry-level size with the 3348 disk module and 2 spindles of 35 MB for 62,500 US dollars and a station with 4 spindles of 70 MB. The first real encapsulated Winchester, in which the read heads and disk unit were no longer separated, was the IBM 3350 with a capacity of 317 MB, which came onto the market in 1975. All subsequent models up to the hard disks in PCs did not change the functional principle of the Winchester drives, as they were soon called.

Demilitarized naming

IBM's marketing department was still trying to steer the name away from ammunition and guns by referring to the Winchester Mystery House, which heiress Sarah Winchester gradually had built in San José. Whether a house full of deceptive staircases, secret passages and trapdoors with 160 rooms is better suited to the stack of disks for operating systems and application files is open to question.

In any case, the successful Winchester disk drive business was highly profitable. As James W. Cortada showed in his book “IBM: The Rise and Fall and Reinvention of a Global Icon”, IBM achieved higher profits with its Winchester drives from the 1970s to the mid-1980s than with all its computer models. IBM therefore brought numerous lawsuits against companies such as Memorex and Telex, which were pushing into the market with IBM-compatible hard disks.

The concept of the Winchester drive made its way into the PC era, even at heise online. The mainframe programmer Peter Norton played a large part in this, who started talking about Winchester disks from version 1.2 of his program “Norton Unerase”, which could restore deleted files (version 1.0 could only erase on floppy disks). It was only in his book “Inside the IBM PC” that he explained to his readers that the name Winchester referred to the hard disk.

What remains is a derived secondary hit: -30- also known as 30-dash, was the character used by journalists at an Atex terminal to end the entry of a text in the Atex typesetting system widely used by US newspaper publishers. The text was then released for typesetting, colloquially it was sent to the typesetter.

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