This Will Knock Your Socks Off

This Will Knock Your Socks Off

I was 12 years old on September 4, 1956, when IBM announced the 350 Disk Storage Unit. It was the heart of the IBM 305 RAMAC, the first commercial computer with a moving-head hard drive, and the first storage system based on magnetic disks to provide random access to data.

To say it was massive is an understatement. It took up 16 square feet, weighed over a ton, and had to be transported by cargo plane. Its total capacity? Just 5 megabytes. It came with fifty 24-inch disks, stored five million characters of accounting data, and could be leased for $3,200 per month. Its first customer was the United Airlines' reservation system.

Before this, computers relied on paper punch cards—a hundred-year-old legacy feature that was easily destroyed and largely inefficient. We often complain today about legacy features holding back new technologies, but the 305 RAMAC sure as hell beat punch cards. It could hold the equivalent of 64,000 of them!

But to really put that 1956 technology into perspective, think about the world today.

Just one photo I shoot with my digital camera is 11.4 megabytes. If I had to store that single modern photo on that 1956 IBM machine, the equipment would have weighed over two tons and cost $7,296 per month just to rent the space.

Today, a modern memory card is capable of storing 512 Gigabytes of data on a chip weighing less than an ounce, for a one-time cost of about $95.

To get that much data storage in 1956, the equipment would have weighed 102,400 tons and cost $327,680,000 per month.

From 100,000 tons to less than an ounce. What next? Keep reading.

The Silicon Valley Origins & The Mona Lisa

By the time production ended in 1961, IBM had manufactured over 1,000 RAMACs. They were leased to companies for $3,200 a month. For those businesses, it was worth every penny—the amount of data they could store and the speed at which they could access it was becoming crucial to their bottom lines. It was those massive 1950s investments that pushed the development of hard drives, eventually shrinking them down to the ones we use in our gadgets today.

In September 2006, the tech world marked the 50th anniversary of that first commercial hard drive. It was designed and built right here in what would eventually become Silicon Valley. That first computing unit had a total memory storage capacity of a whopping 5 megabytes on fifty 24-inch platters.

"The digital photograph of the Mona Lisa here in the slide show presentation is bigger than that!" joked IBM Vice President of Storage Barry Rudolph, addressing a group of analysts and journalists at the company's Almaden Research Center south of San Jose.

By comparison, the IBM System Storage DS8000 Turbo, introduced that same August, could store up to 320 terabytes of information—the equivalent of all the images held in the Guggenheim, the Louvre, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art combined.

To put that evolution into perspective: in 1956, the 350 Disk Storage Unit could hold the digital equivalent of the collected works of Shakespeare. Today's DS8000 can hold more than 76 million copies of Shakespeare's works.