Heads Up! The Computer Hard Drive Is 50 Years Old Next Month!

[matcom]

<snip>

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 ," 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."

That feature, and the fact that every year scientists have managed to compress more and more information on hard drives for less and less cost, has led to a revolution just as dramatic as the one triggered by the much more celebrated microprocessor. Massive storage has allowed huge businesses to thrive. Without astronomically capacious random-access hard disks, you couldn't imagine the likes of Google, eBay or Amazon. Yet the wizards in the storage field, who constantly fight the boundaries of physics to eke out more density on increasingly tiny disks, don't get respect. "Instead of Silicon Valley, they should call it Ferrous Oxide Valley," says Mark Kryder, chief technical officer of Seagate. "It wasn't the microprocessor that enabled the personal video recorder, it was storage. It's enabling new industries."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14096484/site/newsweek/from/ET/

[LSK]

1. 50 years old and it still works???

Probably doesnt hold much porn thou.

:popcorn:

[arwalden]

2. My First Hard Drive Was A Mere 10 MB, And Cost Almost $1000...

... it was an external hard drive called the "Sider" (about the size of a shoebox) for my trusty Apple IIe (or Apple //e).



I was in HEAVEN!! Ten MEGA-bytes... how on earth could I ever find a way to fill up TEN WHOLE MEGABYTES? Surely this would last me the rest of my life!

[matcom]

3. how much gay porn could it hold?

:D

[Richardo]

4. 10 MB worth

Sheesh. :eyes: