Winchester N.
Informal Generic Term For
Sealed-enclosure Magnetic-disk Drives In Which The Read-write Head
Planes Over The Disk Surface On An Air Cushion.
Informal generic term for
sealed-enclosure magnetic-disk drives in which the read-write head
planes over the disk surface on an air cushion. There is a legend
that the name arose because the original 1973 engineering prototype
for what later became the IBM 3340 featured two 30-megabyte
volumes; 30-30 became `Winchester' when somebody noticed the
similarity to the common term for a famous Winchester rifle (in the
latter, the first 30 referred to caliber and the second to the
grain weight of the charge). (It is sometimes incorrectly claimed
that Winchester was the laboratory in which the technology was
developed.)
