Happy Birthday to the Hard Drive
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It may be hard to believe, but this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of the hard drive. From its beginnings at IBM, the hard drive has both grown (in capacity) and shrunk (in physical size). It has also changed our lives in more ways than you might think.
Unless you're a historian or a computer buff, it's hard to be impressed with the RAMAC today. Shipped for the first time on September 13, 1956, the Random Access Method of Accounting and Control weighed a full ton and was about the size of a refrigerator (or two, depending on who you asked). It boasted fifty 24-inch disks, coated with iron oxide. These bad boys could store a whopping five million characters - or about 5 MB. This gave it an areal density of about 2,000 bits per square inch.
Overclockers should appreciate this: the RAMAC generated so much heat that it had its own separate air compressor to protect the two moving heads that read and wrote information. That made the unit rather noisy. If the size and the noise didn't deter you from lusting after this technological marvel, the price surely did. You see, IBM didn't sell them; the company leased them by the year. One RAMAC would set you back $35,000 annually. That's $250,000 in today's dollars.
Most PC users today would more quickly recognize a later IBM product as the "true" ancestor of the modern hard drive. The model 3340 sealed hard disk drive began shipping in 1973. It had two spindles that could handle 30 MB each, thus earning it the nickname "30/30 Winchester," after the rifle of that name.
Those of us who began our contact with computers at a time when hard drives were a fact of life find it hard to imagine what a difference the introduction of the RAMAC made. We might wish we could afford Seagate's 750 GB Barracuda drive (between $345 and $500 at the time of this writing), but the fact is, even the 5 MB RAMAC was a vast improvement over what was available at the time, and the people who saw it were amazed. Jim Porter, who worked at Crown Zellerbach when the company received one of the first units delivered by IBM, explained to Newsweek: "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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