Amazing account of the PhotoStore, an optical terabyte storage device built at Lawrence Livermore Labratories in 1970:
Thiry-two unexposed chips arrived at the Laboratory in a small plastic box or "cell", which was a little smaller than a pack of cigarettes. These were packed in a carton of ten, wrapped in a black cover to exclude light. When more "raw" film was needed, an operator would open a hatch in the top of a low section of the machine and shove the carton in, end-first. Blades would rip the box open, and the cells would drop into a queue from which they would, one by one, advance to the next step: exposure and development.
When a cell reached the head of the queue, its lid would be removed by depressing a release catch, and the chips would be mechanically extracted, one at a time, and held in the beam from an electron gun. The electron beam was magnetically aimed so as to encode the stream of data to be written, forming it into a sequence of dark and light spots on the chip. Between chips, the magnetic field would be sensed and adjusted so to to assure that it was focussed precisely enough to create the tiny spots that were needed. At specified intervals the filiments of the gun would be changed automatically by rotating a turret of eight filaments; only after these were exhausted would operator intervention be required.
(Thanks, Eli the Bearded!)
