And of course if you wrote a program to move the read-write arm in certain ways you could make it walk around the room. Or block the door, requiring that a hole be cut in the wall to get back in there.<p>An old professor of mine described these as like a `washing machine in heat'.
<i>"The hard drive pictured weighed over 1 ton, and was capable of storing 5 Mb or data."</i><p>Considering that personal computers in the early 80's often sported a whopping 4k of RAM, 5 Mb in 1956 was quite a respectable amount of storage.<p>I'm frankly surprised they managed to get 5 Mb on any type of media back in 1956. It's a wonder they had enough data to fill it.