Thought I would share something I found.
A bit before I did anything with a computer but not by much.
http://royal.pingdom.com/2008/04/08/the-history-of-computer-data-storage-in-pictures/
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Was this hard drive used for in flight entertainment 
@ Reinhard Ostermeier -
Good One… 
The first non-mainframe drive I used was a 10mb Corvus that the local computer users group had, that we could all share at the weekly meetings across the street from the IBM plant in san jose, back in 1981 or so I think
It was much much smaller than the big ones that the Dec 11/750 and 11/780 I used at my dad’s work (for my first summer job) the same year.
The first one I owned was a 20mb Seagate barracuda that I got for my Amiga 500 much later in the 80’s
The Corvus drives were pretty revolutionary - smaller than the big units for mini computers, but long as grandpa’s Buick - too long to fit well through a doorway (I know because I destroyed one by just lightly catching the edge of the door and knocking the heads irreparably out of alignment).
They used to back up to VHS video tape, and the flying heads were dynamically aligned against a pre-recorded platter surface. They used a huge voice-coil style electromagnet to move the head and sounded like washing machines when busy. Calibrating one required an o-scope and a fair bit of patience. And ‘head crashes’ were noisy and dramatic events. Corvus also invented a really interesting twisted-pair networking technology, back in the day when token-ring or 10base2 were your only other choices.
I actually worked for a company that wrote device drivers for hard drives (or rather for their host adaptors) in 1989-1990 and I wrote a few for seagate. The most impressive hard drive we had on site was a whopping 100mb scsi drive made by “connor”
As a side note, we were just a few miles from the 1989 Loma Prieta 7.1 quake epicenter (about halfway down Saratoga Sunnyvale Rd from Apple and the epicenter in the mountains) and when the quake struck I was forced into and through a plaster wall by a collapsing shelving unit full of hard drives. I was pretty much buried in plaster, shelves and heavy full height hard drives. Fun times.
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