winchester

hardware An informal generic term for floating-head

magnetic disk drives in which the read-write head planes

over the disk surface on an air cushion.

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).

[Jargon File]

(1994-12-06)