farbot.com

Before Blu-Ray, HD-DVD, DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, and even CD-ROM there were floppy disk drives, and before the floppy disk drive was the hard drive. IBM created the first hard drive, called the IBM 1301 with the help of engineer Al Shugart back in 1961. Al, who died this week at the age of 76, founded Seagate Technology in 1979 and was also responsible for the success of the Apple II's 5.25-inch floppy drive. ArsTechnica has a brief review of his career.

Hard drives showing up in modern consoles and their ever-larger capacities on PC's were made possible by Mr. Shugart. I'm sure if you could go back in time and tell a young Al Shugart that we'd be playing video game systems with hard drives with multi-gigabyte capacities in our own homes alongside personal computers with even larger capacity hard drives, he probably wouldn't believe you.

There are a boatload of inventions that are used in every console on the market today -- things that aren't as flashy as GPU's and CPU's or HDMI connectors -- that are enabled only by the presence of more fundamental technologies. Some of these aren't as new as you think. Ethernet -- the networking technology that is nearly everywhere today, giving us ethernet jacks on TiVos, ReplayTVs, PCs, and consoles -- is over 30 years old, for example. Wikipedia has more on that.

From Aeropause.