[25-9-2006] Last week saw the 50th anniversary of the very first hard drive.
Happy birthday, hard drives. This week saw the 50th anniversary of the very first hard drive, the IBM RAMAC 305 (such a trendy name!), introduced in 1956.
The storage part of the drive was about 5' square and its capacity was around 4.4MB. Apparently the drive could have been given a larger storage capacity, but the IBM sales department didn't think they could sell the thing with more storage!
The entire RAMAC unit weighed over a ton and had to be moved around with forklifts and delivered via large cargo airplanes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMAC (includes picture)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/15/hard_drive_is_50/
The storage part of the drive was about 5' square and its capacity was around 4.4MB. Apparently the drive could have been given a larger storage capacity, but the IBM sales department didn't think they could sell the thing with more storage!
The entire RAMAC unit weighed over a ton and had to be moved around with forklifts and delivered via large cargo airplanes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAMAC (includes picture)
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/09/15/hard_drive_is_50/