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The Hard Disk That Changed the World
The Hard Disk That Changed the World
In 1956, the IBM RAMAC 305 made history as the very first commercial computer to use a moving-head hard disk drive (magnetic disk storage) for secondary storage. It held what was then a groundbreaking 3.75 megabytes of data. IBM proudly touted the system as being able to store the equivalent of 64,000 punched cards. (For the record, RAMAC stood for "Random Access Method of Accounting and Control.")
The 305 was one of the last vacuum tube computers that IBM ever built, and it was an absolute beast. It weighed over a ton, had to be moved around warehouses with forklifts, and was delivered to customers via large cargo airplanes.
Interestingly enough, the storage capacity of the drive actually could have been increased beyond five megabytes. However, IBM's marketing department at the time was dead set against a larger capacity drive for one simple reason: they didn't know how to sell a product with that much storage!
If a business wanted this cutting-edge technology, it didn't come cheap. The RAMAC 305 was initially leased for $3,200 per month—which is the equivalent of paying over $30,000 a month in today's money!
Yet those who beheld them 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. 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 constantly fight the boundaries of physics to eke out more density on increasingly tiny disks that 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."
What’s Next? The Cloud Era and Beyond
What’s Next? The Cloud Era and Beyond
To put our modern storage into perspective, Apple now offers 1TB (one trillion bytes) and even 2TB options for their latest iPhones and iPads.
Experts agree that these amazing gains in storage density—and the crash in storage costs—will continue for decades. We are now living in an era where massive corporations manage countless petabytes (millions of gigabytes) of data, while terabytes of storage are standard in everyday homes.
Years ago, executives predicted that one day, hard drives holding hundreds of gigabytes would be small enough to wear as jewelry, allowing us to carry every tune we've ever bought, every picture we've ever taken, and every tax record right on our person. The reality is actually far more advanced. Today, high-speed internet and cloud syncing mean we don't even need to carry physical drives at all. Our entire digital lives are instantly accessible from any screen, anywhere in the world.
Unfortunately, all this digital convenience comes with some heavy baggage of its own. We are now waist-deep in concerns about cybersecurity, data brokers, and privacy. Because our personal devices hold the entirety of our lives, and because corporate servers store so much intimate information about our habits and histories, protecting that data has become one of the greatest technological challenges of our time.
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