50th Anniversary of the First Hard Drive

seaeagle

Quote:

August 7, 2006 issue - If there's a bottle of vintage champagne you've been saving, next month is the time to pop it open: it's the 50th anniversary of hard-disk storage. Don't laugh. On Sept. 13, 1956, IBM shipped the first unit of the RAMAC (Random Access Method of Accounting and Control) and set in motion a process that would change the way we live.

The RAMAC, designed in Big Blue's San Jose, Calif., research center, is the ultimate ancestor of that 1.8-inch drive that holds 7,500 songs inside your pocket-size $299 iPod. Of course, the RAMAC would have made a lousy music player. The drive weighed a full ton, and to lease it you'd pay about $250,000 a year in today's dollars. Since it required a separate air compressor to protect the two moving "heads" that read and wrote information, it was noisy. The total amount of information stored on its 50 spinning iron-oxide-coated disks—each of them a pizza-size 24 inches—was 5 megabytes. That's not quite enough to hold two MP3 copies of Elvis Presley's "Hound Dog."

Yet those who beheld the RAMAC were astonished. "It was about the size of two large refrigerators, about as tall as a person stands, and though it used vacuum tubes, it was always running," recalls Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach in San Francisco in the mid-'50s and would proudly take people to the basement to see what he claims was the very first unit delivered by IBM. "It really turned the tide [in the Information Age]," he says. "It was the first to offer random access, whereas before you would have to wind a tape from one end to the other to access data."

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Imagine having one of those next to your desk!!!

tbernstein · Joined: May 16, 2003 Posts: 1576 Location: London

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WOW! That's just SO kewl!

I worked on some of the 'old' stuff, fourty years ago.
It was a real chore in those days to set up a hard drive.

One of my first PC HD's was a Seagate ST-4038, full height 30 meg MFM drive.
It was like heaven on earth to have so much storage in a random access drive, sealed against mice, bugs and dirt.

Nowadays, we have more memory than that on our video cards. Laughing

How things change with time.

Shadow Cool

ejward · Joined: Jan 06, 2003 Posts: 7054

My first HD was in my IBM PC. It was 10 meg and believe it or not, I didn't out grow it for years. Actually, it still works. My next drive was 120 MEG !!!! That cost me about $250. Talk about a jump in size though.

seaeagle

Here's an interesting photo gallery of making the first disk drive:

Photo gallery: Making the first disk drive: ZDNet Australia

Werebo

Good grief!!!! Did you see all those fingerprints all over that platter???? I hope that guy has a backup cos that's never gonna work again Sad

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