Was checking out some info on the costs of RAM memory/hard drives and came upon this page that gives a person more than they would EVER want to know about this, but found this notation about the Winchester rifle: :Win73: :Win73:
http://www.littletechshoppe.com/ns1625/winchest.html1956 October 29 — The first hard disk drive is born at IBM. The original was the size of two refrigerators and held 5 megabytes of data at a cost of about $10,000 per megabyte.
In 1973, IBM introduced the IBM 3340 hard disk unit, known as the Winchester, IBM's internal development code name. The term Winchester came from an early model developed by IBM that stored 30 megabytes and had a 30 millisecond access time; so its inventors called it a Winchester in honor of the .30-caliber rifle of the same name. The recording head rode on a layer of air 18 millionths of an inch 0.5 micrometre thick. More down the page: :Win73:Why Was it Called the Winchester Drive? :Win73:
I spent 13 years at IBM Research in San Jose, and although I arrived four years after the Winchester drive, this question was already famous, and several different answers were circulating. They related to the Winchester house, the Winchester rifle, and IBM's development lab at Hursley near Winchester, England.
The right answer is that the name comes from the original drive specifications — two 30 MB spindles in one box. The engineers called it the 30-30 which led the project leader, Ken Haughton, to think of the Winchester rifle. The complete story can be found in chapter 18 of the book Magnetic Recording: the First 100 Years, by Eric D. Daniel, C. Denis Mee, and Mark H. Clark, ISBN 0780347099, IEEE Press, August 1998.
There is a persistent story, that the hard drive was called Winchester because the first ones were invented by the IBM research lab in San Jose. According to this account, the lab was across the street from the Winchester House, home of the widow of the man who invented the Winchester rifle. The lab guys thought the new drive was as fast as a bullet from a Winchester. While this story has been circulating for many years, it isn't accurate.
It is true that the widow of the man who invented the Winchester rifle built a mansion in San Jose. It is still a major tourist attraction known as the Winchester Mystery House. Although the RAMAC was invented at a site close to downtown San Jose, it was not very near the Winchester House. By 1969-1973 when the Winchester disk drive was being developed, IBM had moved its development lab to southern outskirts of San Jose, over ten miles from the Winchester house. Today one finds a movie theater, a shopping center, and a freeway across the street from the Winchester house. The IBM Research lab in San Jose was not involved at all. We didn't get into disk drives until 1979. The Winchester was invented at the product development lab.
Tom Howell
VP, Research
Quantum Corporation
Milpitas, California
